I get a lot of questions about how to do some sort of conversion involving Chinese characters. Most of the time, my answer is something like, “Get Wenlin. Even the free, non-expiring demo version (4 MB) will do what you need — and a lot more.”
For those of you who aren’t familiar with Wenlin, Random Stuff That Matters has posted a five-minute movie (with sound) of Wenlin in action (14.5 MB).
The range of what Wenlin can do extends far beyond what the movie shows. A lot of people might not notice that even in the demo a wide range of options are available under
Edit→Make Transformed Copy
My favorite, which is available only with the full version, is
Edit→Make Transformed Copy→Pinyin Transcription
Oh, it is a thing of beauty. (That function, though, works only in the full version, not the demo.)
For those of you who have the full version, I thought I’d share a little-known feature of Wenlin: its ability to search for regular expressions.
Let’s say you are trying to remember a chengyu (set phrase) about studying, but all you can recall is that it contains the sound “rubu.” You’re not sure of the characters. You’re not even sure of the tones. First you look up entries beginning with “rubu” in Wenlin’s electronic edition of the ABC Chinese-English Comprehensive Dictionary:
List→Words by Pinyin- Then enter
rubuand hitOK.
This will take you to rùbùfÅ«chÅ« and rúbùshèngyÄ«. But neither of those is what you’re looking for. Now what? Here’s where regular expressions come in handy.
Hit Ctrl+F to search for something within the current page.
In the Find box, enter
- re=r(u|ū|ú|ǔ|ù)b(u|ū|ú|ǔ|ù)
This will yield:
- chÇ’ngrÇ”bùjÄ«ng 寵辱ä¸é©š[å® --惊] f.e. unmoved by honors/disgrace
- lèirúbùgÄn æ·šæ¿¡ä¸ä¹¾[泪--å¹²] f.e. be drowned in tears
- nièrúbùyán å›åš…ä¸è¨€[å—«---] f.e. 〈wr.〉 move the mouth without speaking
- xuérúbùjà å¸å¦‚ä¸åŠ[å¦---] f.e. study as if one could never learn enough
Bingo!
The reason for using OR pipes to separate the possibilities instead of putting them together — i.e., the reason for writing (u|Å«|ú|Ç”|ù) instead of [uūúǔù] — is that the regex library sees non-ASCII characters as strings of bytes (UTF-8); thus, without the pipes you could end up with extra garbage or not find what you intend to at all. This might be fixed in the next version.
Chinese learner said
Hello,
I’d like to share with you some some useful tools to learn Chinese :
- Learn Chinese : Free Mandarin Chinese lessons. Each of the 15 units contain easy to understand dialogues, usage notes and a practice page.
- Chinese-English dictionary : An easy-to-use dictionary with over 34,000 entries. It can be searched by Chinese characters, Pinyin, or English. Audio pronunciation is available.
Good luck. :-)
Pinyin news » Blog Archive » Wenlin releases upgrade to 3.4 said
[...] also Wenlin: ’software for learning Chinese’, Pinyin News, May 4, [...]
Laowai Chinese è€å¤–ä¸æ–‡ : How to type pinyin (pÄ«nyÄ«n) with tone markings said
[...] you’re looking for something more than these three options, I suggest checking out Mark’s post about Wenlin. Posted by Albert on Tuesday, September 19, 2006, at 9:41 am, and filed under Computer, [...]