For those that love Chinese/Taiwanese websites, but don't know enough Chinese yet to fully navigate them, then these next several links are for you. These tools are firefox add-ons and such that when you put your mouse over a particular word in Chinese it will pop up message next to it showing you the reading, the traditional 汉字 or character of the word, the pinyin for it with all the accent marks, and what it means in English. Now, these aren't as good as rikai (for Japanese) where it shows inflections of verbs and adjectives, so you still have to figure out a sentence based on what is in it. It is also useful for reading things written in here you don't understand.
The first addon is Chinese Perapera-kun. I've used it and it is pretty much simple to use. To activate it once it is installed, all you need to do is to right-click on a page and scroll down to the option it gives you for Perapera-kun.
It can be found
here (Currently needs to be updated to Firefox 3.0 and above)
The other is one I have been using recently that is just new on the firefox add-ons, it is called strictly "Mandarin Popup". It runs on the same engine perapera-kun does except it comes with a handy built in dictionary so you can search for words based on 汉字 or pinyin (but not English entries yet
sad ). After searching for a word, they give you the simplified 汉字, traditional 汉字, pinyin, and English meaning. The file itself isn't huge either. To turn on the popups for when you want to read a page, you have to go in the lower-right hand corner and click where it says Mandarin Popup:Enabled/Disabled in order to use it. To get the searchable dictionary up, you right click on a page and select "Browse Mandarin Popup Dictionary". This tool was made for English speakers learning Mandarin.
It can be found
here.Hope this helps all you students of Mandarin!
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