User Comments - tiaopidepi
tiaopidepi
Posted on: Funny Business -- 搞笑， 好笑， 可笑
February 10, 2009 at 6:28 PM@dunderklumpen: if you want the output to look different, send me a mail and I'll make a new version for you.
Posted on: Funny Business -- 搞笑， 好笑， 可笑
February 9, 2009 at 6:14 AM@Dunderklumpen,
There are a few Hanzi -> Pinyin converters out there. Here's one that I wrote for my own use. You can paste Hanzi in it and get pinyin (with tone marks) out. It only runs on Windows/.NET but it's very, very free. http://cid-cb841d691d9279ad.skydrive.live.com/self.aspx/Public/Pinyinizer.zip
@excuter,
Nice trick with Word! I'll have to install the Office IME!
Posted on: Talking with Numbers
February 1, 2009 at 7:47 AMMy sister has a Starbucks mug that only has numbers on it (and a little Starbucks logo.) There are no explanations and there is no text. It must have 300 different "phrases" encoded on it. Even though she has teenage children she only understands a handful of them.
Posted on: Slang-ular Momentum
January 25, 2009 at 7:23 AMI've always thought 800 made more sense as a transliteration of "bye-bye". It's common to pronounce this as bābǎi (八百) or even bǎibǎi (百百) but bābā (八八) really sounds nothing like I've ever heard.
Posted on: Chinese Hospitality and Finding Vegetarian Food
December 20, 2008 at 4:55 PM@kesirui: I saw Häagen-Dazs all over Beijing, Nanjing and Shanghai. Oddly, there was one next to every temple. This is possibly because temples are tourist attractions and tourists will spend money on trivialities like ice cream.
Even more odd is the name Häagen-Dazs. When they created the ice cream they wanted to find a name that looked vaguely Scandinavian to Americans. They even put a map of Scandinavia on the ice cream container. However, the character sequences äa and zs don't appear in any Scandinavian languages. The zs appears in Hungarian and the hard g is common in German but neither of these are Scandinavian countries.
The omnipresent Häagen-Dazs must look very funny to Scandinavians who visit Chinese temples.
Posted on: Learning the Lei Feng Song
December 20, 2008 at 2:40 AMPete,
Thank you. You said exactly what I wanted to say.
阿皮
Posted on: To bag or not to bag?
December 2, 2008 at 7:10 AMStores in the States are all moving to discouraging bag use. It helps them in two ways: it saves money on bag purchases and they get to write off *your* charitable donation of 5 or 10 cents.
Myself, I could use a different incentive. Rather than give me 5 cents discount for each bag, why don't they have special queues for people with bags? Anything to avoid the grocery store lines. I can spend hours deciding between different wines and cheeses but 5 minutes spent in line seems like an eternity.
Posted on: The Surname Code
November 27, 2008 at 7:42 PMtmod5682,
Jenny is saying 非常, fēicháng, which means extremely, extraordinarily, exceptional, unusual.
Posted on: Get in line!
November 24, 2008 at 2:12 AMHmmm...looks like CPod is plagiarizing from EnglishPod. Maybe there's a lawsuit coming?
(I like this Chinesepod team very much! I will support it forever!)
Posted on: Funny Business -- 搞笑， 好笑， 可笑
February 11, 2009 at 7:06 AM@xemrac: I also have a Silverlight version of Pinyinizer online. Silverlight's a browser plugin (like Flash.) It works on any Intel-based Macs but not on PowerPC-based Macs. It's probably not as bug-free as the Windows version because I don't actually use the online one. But I'm happy to fix any bugs in it, time permitting.
(There is one bug that I won't fix for a while: if you mouse-over the Hanzi text, the dictionary definition comes up in the dictionary box on the right-hand side. The problem is, I don't yet have a good way in Silverlight to tell what character the mouse is hovering over so I do a bunch of crazy math and get it kind of wrong. You can still highlight stuff to look it up, and of course the pinyinizing part works just fine.)