Does an online Chinese Character Pronouncer exist?

[Mide]

So this may be a weird question. I am looking for some online program that can pronounce a Chinese character.

Like many Chinese Americans, I can speak and hear/understand but I can't read, write, or type at all.

An aunt has sent me a short letter in Chinese and Google Translator has done its job in translating it well enough for me to understand. I know exactly what to say in Chinese and while using Google to come up with some words, I don't know if it is correct. If I had some program read back what the characters say then I would know if it was correct or not.

I'm cracking up just writing this since it is so ludicrous that I am illiterate in a language I can speak.

 

[Matthiasa]

I can't believe you learned it without at least someone along the way knowing how to read it.
I would say check google though as I've seen that for English stuff, so I would assume other languages have that..

 

[shopbruin]

I can't believe you learned it without at least someone along the way knowing how to read it.
I would say check google though as I've seen that for English stuff, so I would assume other languages have that..

I never really learned how to read either. My parents never sent me to Chinese school to learn, and they didn't teach me that many characters either. It wasn't as big of a priority as "you better do well in school!"

 

[ConstipatedVigilante]

www.nciku.com

I don't know if the pronunciation thing is what you need (it's generally for individual characters/words), but the site is a lifesaver. I'm in my third year of studying chinese, and my classmates and I swear by that site.

 

[JMapleton]

I can't believe you learned it without at least someone along the way knowing how to read it.
I would say check google though as I've seen that for English stuff, so I would assume other languages have that..

Do you know how hard Chinese is to learn in writing? Each word has a unique character, and there is no rhyme or reason to them, you have to just memorize thousands of unique characters. You would almost have to grow up in China to memorize those and be exposed to them on a daily basis.

 

[CottonRabbit]

You can paste your whole letter here and have it read it to you.

http://text-to-speech.imtranslator.net/

Choose Chinese as the language. It's surprisingly accurate. I've only seen it stumble in texts where people append a lot of 儿's to their words.

 

[Matthiasa]

Do you know how hard Chinese is to learn in writing? Each word has a unique character, and there is no rhyme or reason to them, you have to just memorize thousands of unique characters. You would almost have to grow up in China to memorize those and be exposed to them on a daily basis.

How is memorizing thousands of characters any different then memorizing tens of thousands of words?

And I said at least one probably would have which apparently was the case...

 

[Crono]

How is memorizing thousands of characters any different then memorizing tens of thousands of words?

And I said at least one probably would have which apparently was the case...

You have to memorize them visually for writing.

The English alphabet is superior in this regard, as there are only 26 characters to memorize (not including punctuation).

 

[Matthiasa]

You have to memorize them visually for writing.

The English alphabet is superior in this regard, as there are only 26 characters to memorize (not including punctuation).

Yeah but there are still hundreds of thousands of words... And those do still need to be memorized, English isn't all that phonetic of language.

 

[Pepsei]

So this may be a weird question. I am looking for some online program that can pronounce a Chinese character.

Like many Chinese Americans, I can speak and hear/understand but I can't read, write, or type at all.

An aunt has sent me a short letter in Chinese and Google Translator has done its job in translating it well enough for me to understand. I know exactly what to say in Chinese and while using Google to come up with some words, I don't know if it is correct. If I had some program read back what the characters say then I would know if it was correct or not.

I'm cracking up just writing this since it is so ludicrous that I am illiterate in a language I can speak.

paste the words here and we'll pronounce it for you. but it depends on what dialect you want. there are many.

 

[Pepsei]

Yeah but there are still hundreds of thousands of words... And those do still need to be memorized, English isn't all that phonetic of language.

well, i would argue that it's different. not necessary harder or easier. maybe different learning curve.

when you see a chinese word you don't understand the process/steps of figuring out what it means would be different with an unknown english word.

i also known people who can speak xxxxx but can't write xxxx (where xxxx is english or chinese)

 

[JMapleton]

How is memorizing thousands of characters any different then memorizing tens of thousands of words?

And I said at least one probably would have which apparently was the case...

Because if you don't know the character, you cannot read the word. Obviously you do not know about Chinese characters.

I can read a word I've never seen or heard before by sounding it out and simply reading the letters. You cannot do that with Chinese. Each word is a completely random character from what I understand (if there are anything Chinese people here, they can elaborate).

 

[xCxStylex]

Matthiasa, please stfu. It's apparent from your ethnocentric views that you're ignorant and stupid, and you probably only know of romanized languages with alphabets. You're probably a dumbshit that only knows English at that, but I gave you the benefit of the doubt.


The simplest way to boil down reading and writing Chinese is to equate each word is a fucking picture. Memorize the picture, then you know the word. Now try memorize a couple thousand pictures, that of the average vocabulary. Go on further for specialized and technical words.

I can't believe you learned it without at least someone along the way knowing how to read it.
I would say check google though as I've seen that for English stuff, so I would assume other languages have that..

Yeah but there are still hundreds of thousands of words... And those do still need to be memorized, English isn't all that phonetic of language.

 

[TruePaige]

Matthiasa, please stfu. It's apparent from your ethnocentric views that you're ignorant and stupid, and you probably only know of romanized languages with alphabets. You're probably a dumbshit that only knows English at that, but I gave you the benefit of the doubt.


The simplest way to boil down reading and writing Chinese is to equate each word is a fucking picture. Memorize the picture, then you know the word. Now try memorize a couple thousand pictures, that of the average vocabulary. Go on further for specialized and technical words.

Holy over aggressive, batman.

 

[dighn]

The simplest way to boil down reading and writing Chinese is to equate each word is a fucking picture. Memorize the picture, then you know the word. Now try memorize a couple thousand pictures, that of the average vocabulary. Go on further for specialized and technical words.

Doesn't quite work like that. Chinese characters are more like 2 dimensional spelling. There are common components (strokes and combinations of strokes). Once you learn the basic characters, words are then formed by combining characters into strings, so no you don't have to memorize "pictures" for everything.

 

[Mr. Pedantic]

Yeah but there are still hundreds of thousands of words... And those do still need to be memorized, English isn't all that phonetic of language.

It's a lot more phonetic than Chinese.

Holy over aggressive, batman.

I'd say the same...except he's completely right.

Doesn't quite work like that. Chinese characters are more like 2 dimensional spelling. There are common components (strokes and combinations of strokes). Once you learn the basic characters, words are then formed by combining characters into strings, so no you don't have to memorize "pictures" for everything.

Yes, some (many) characters have components of other characters based on their meaning. However, it's not intuitive at all how the combinations of components fit together, where they go in the character, what goes after them, etc. I actually would rather memorize pictures than characters, you know what they say about a picture being a thousand words...

 

[ChaoZ]

http://www.cantonese.sheik.co.uk/scripts/wordlist.htm
http://humanum.arts.cuhk.edu.hk/Lexis/lexi-can/

Use them together and you can learn to pronounce the jyutping.

 

[dighn]

Yes, some (many) characters have components of other characters based on their meaning. However, it's not intuitive at all how the combinations of components fit together, where they go in the character, what goes after them, etc. I actually would rather memorize pictures than characters, you know what they say about a picture being a thousand words...

No it's not intuitive in general (but neither is the spelling in English imo). I was referring more to combining characters together to form complex words. Often the meaning is apparent from the component characters.

Measuring how "easy" a language is to learn in absolute terms is not a simple task. I had a hard time memorizing English words when I was unfamiliar with it, but now memorizing new words is effortless. The language didn't change, I did.

 

[Pepsei]

Because if you don't know the character, you cannot read the word. Obviously you do not know about Chinese characters.

I can read a word I've never seen or heard before by sounding it out and simply reading the letters. You cannot do that with Chinese. Each word is a completely random character from what I understand (if there are anything Chinese people here, they can elaborate).

you can sort of do that with some chinese words. true that each word is a 'picture' but some words are a combination of pictures of words that you know already.

so you can 'attempt' to pronounce the word even if you do not know it, but it is more of an 'educated guess' that you can't always get right. in fact quite rare.

also, you can look at the combination within the word to figure out what it 'may' mean.

like the english word "overclock", a person who doesn't know what it means, can guess by looking at it.

the chinese word 魚 is fish... so looking at 鯊, you can guess that it probably have something to do with fish. and if you know that upper part of the word. you'd be able to pronounce it correctly. (it's shark, btw)



now, using the word in a sentence helps in chinese just like in english.

 

[Mr. Pedantic]

No it's not intuitive in general (but neither is the spelling in English imo). I was referring more to combining characters together to form complex words. Often the meaning is apparent from the component characters.

English spelling is a lot more intuitive than Chinese. At least the fact that English has an alphabet makes it a lot easier to use a dictionary. Let me give you an example:

This character has a 'person' component, a 'mouth' component, and a 'wood' component. But I still have absolutely no clue what the character actually means. And I'd be willing to bet that at least one of those components doesn't actually have anything to do with the actual meaning of the character.

As for 'complex words', those are more like English phrases than words.

so you can 'attempt' to pronounce the word even if you do not know it, but it is more of an 'educated guess' that you can't always get right. in fact quite rare.

Even with 'educated guesses' it's still more luck than anything else, because the structure of the character gives no clues as to the intonation. And wrong intonation, wrong meaning. But with some characters it's easy(ish) and some characters it's hard.

 

[dighn]

English spelling is a lot more intuitive than Chinese. At least the fact that English has an alphabet makes it a lot easier to use a dictionary. Let me give you an example:

This character has a 'person' component, a 'mouth' component, and a 'wood' component. But I still have absolutely no clue what the character actually means. And I'd be willing to bet that at least one of those components doesn't actually have anything to do with the actual meaning of the character.

As for 'complex words', those are more like English phrases than words.

There are multiple ways to index characters in Chinese. One of the meanings of the character you gave is "protect". Now English is not my native language, but I can't discern the meaning from p r o t e c t unless I already know the word.

By "complex words" I meant words that use more than one characters. A simple example would be "苹果" i.e. apple. From the second character you know it's a fruit, and that aids memorization as well.

 

[MJinZ]

Matthiasa, please stfu. It's apparent from your ethnocentric views that you're ignorant and stupid, and you probably only know of romanized languages with alphabets. You're probably a dumbshit that only knows English at that, but I gave you the benefit of the doubt.


The simplest way to boil down reading and writing Chinese is to equate each word is a fucking picture. Memorize the picture, then you know the word. Now try memorize a couple thousand pictures, that of the average vocabulary. Go on further for specialized and technical words.

Well..... this isn't completely true. Characters are most often composed of basic simpler and put together and slightly modified. Familiarity also helps, as well as context. You may be able to recognize certain words when they are put into a sentence, but singularly, you may have trouble or get confused.

In any case, if one is not exposed to a language like Chinese for extended periods, you will lose the ability to read it proficiently. This obviously isn't the case with English, or other Romantic or Germanic languages.

 

[Mr. Pedantic]

There are multiple ways to index characters in Chinese. One of the meanings of the character you gave is "protect". Now English is not my native language, but I can't discern the meaning from p r o t e c t unless I already know the word.

But you can look it up in a dictionary, and if someone says it to you you can guess the spelling. However, if someone says it to me since I have no idea how to actually write the character, I have no way of looking it up unless the dictionary happens to index by pinying, and I have no way of improving my written vocabulary in that manner.

As for that word, the site I got it from had the pinying for it but I couldn't play the pronunciation file. I actually thought it was bag.

By "complex words" I meant words that use more than one characters. A simple example would be "苹果" i.e. apple. From the second character you know it's a fruit, and that aids memorization as well.

But then you have 'words' like banana, xiang jiao. From the 'word' I know that it probably smells good (a matter of opinion...), but other than that...

 

[Pepsei]

Even with 'educated guesses' it's still more luck than anything else, because the structure of the character gives no clues as to the intonation. And wrong intonation, wrong meaning. But with some characters it's easy(ish) and some characters it's hard.

yep, that's why i said it is quite rare. and that's pretty much the ONLY way to guess the intonation if you do not know the word, and there isn't a pinyin next to it. you can still try to figure out what it means by looking at the entire sentence, and try to pronounce it until someone corrects you.

i probably know about a five-six thousand chinese words. and there are a small percentage that fits.

it's just a totally differently type of system, that it actually uses the different area of your brain.

there was a guy with a Traumatic Brain Injury that lost the ability to communicate but then was able to get that back by learning chinese.

 

[MJinZ]

There are multiple ways to index characters in Chinese. One of the meanings of the character you gave is "protect". Now English is not my native language, but I can't discern the meaning from p r o t e c t unless I already know the word.

By "complex words" I meant words that use more than one characters. A simple example would be "苹果" i.e. apple. From the second character you know it's a fruit, and that aids memorization as well.

That one is easy...

That's a person protecting a child.

That's a child. See the head and body? Yea.