Pleco - Translating Chinese to English - The Answers

Here is the answer to how you can find the answers for the following:

1. If you are in Taiwan, and you see a poster with Jacky Cheung's face on it and with his name "張學友" underneath it. How do you find out about the pronunciation of those words?

Answers

First, once you arrive in Taiwan (or HongKong or Macau) remember they use Traditional Chinese.

a. Open up Pleco

b.  Change your keyboard to  简体手写 (The handwriting mode). I know it is meant for the simplified version, but Pleco is good enough to detect the bracket words. So I don't want to add another handwriting mode specifically for the traditional characters. See the following

You cannot use 繁體拼音mode because the poster doesn’t provide you with pinyin.

c. Once you have found the correct character, open it up and play the audio to listen to the correct pronunciation

d. Repeat the same step for another two characters

e. Now, you know Jacky Cheung’s Chinese name.

Easy Peasy!

2. If you are watching CCTV channel in China and you see the word “中国”, what are you going to do to find out what the 2 words mean and how to pronounce it?

Answers

There are 2 possible ways in doing this. One is by following step like in no. 1 

a.     Change your keyboard to  简体手写 (The handwriting mode)

b.     Write 中 and it will prompt you the answer below (circled). Great right? You do not even have to write the second character. It provides you with the phrase, at once!

c.     Now you choose the correct phrase and open it up

d.     Play the speaker to know how to pronounce it correctly and see what the phrase means

While you are doing this, learn the pinyin too… The next time you see the 2 Chinese characters together or separately, you know how they are being pronounced!

中 zhong            middle

国 guo               country

Another way is to listen to the pronunciation of the person on TV. For this method, you will have to know about hanyu pinyin. Most of Chinese or Taiwanese channel come with subtitle. So pay attention to their dialogue and try your very best to match the words that comes out from their mouth to the subtitle. You don’t have to be able to match all, especially when it is a long sentence. Catch the first and last words! Before you know it you will start seeing those words more often and it will be there, stored in your long term memory.

So if you heard that the person is saying something like zhong guo, and see that two Chinese characters ”中国”, but you do not know what it means, here is what you can do:

a.     Change your keyboard to 简体拼音 mode (Chinese Pinyin – Simplified)  

b.     And key in the pinyin that you think you have heard. Sometimes, when I am not too sure of what I heard, I will input what I think is right:

You might key in “zong guo” – no correct result

Or, you might key in “zhong kuo” – and you find that the pinyin for the first character is correct zhong = 中, so you know that "zhong" is the correct pinyin for 中。 keep that, and just make adjustment to the second pinyin.

You will finally end up with “zhong guo” and found your answer.

Stay calm and do not get panic! I have said that the second method works only to those who are already know about pinyin. You will when the time comes!

3. Show me 2 ways of translating words / phrases that you encounter in a beginner book that you have just bought from China / Singapore, where normally characters will be accompanied by pinyin. Try these 3 phrases:

阳光 (Yang guang)，木瓜 (mu gua)， 大人 (da ren)

Answer

First way – Pinyin mode

a.     China uses simplified Chinese. So I will set my keyboard to the simplified mode, 简体拼音

b.     Key in “yang guang” “mu gua” and “da ren”

c.    You get what you are looking for!

Second way – handwriting mode

a.     Change it to this mode of 简体手写

b.     Start writing the first character of each word

c.     If the phrases are prompted after keying only the first character, then great!

d.     If it does not show us the phrases that we want, then do it one by one, write “大” choose it from the list and start writing the second character “人”. See… The answer is there!

Depending what you are trying to strengthen, pinyin or writing, then you should use that method more often.

I believe you have found the answers even before I show you here.

Next post will be an intro to another tool, the bihua.com website.

Happy Learning,

Linda Tan

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