Chinese pinyin tone characters from keyboard?

patniemeyer

Registered
So, I understand the selection of input methods and I can enter chinese and english text into TextEdit. However, as I am still learning Chinese and I like to write out the pinyin along with some of the characters. I cannot figure out how to do this...

I can see the four characters as accent characters in the roman character pallete, however it doesn't seem reasonable to go to the pallette and search for characters every time I want to type a vowel. I can get to second and fourth tone as command-e and command-` accent. However I can find no way in either the chinese or English input methods to get to the other two from the keyboard.

Perhaps I'm missing something in the input method setup because I can't read all of it...

While I'm asking - is there any way to get Chinese to display with pinyin automatically? That would be great.


Thanks,
Pat Niemeyer
Author of Learning Java, O'Reilly & Associates
 
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Learning Chinese pinyin for Chinese Word Processing, huh? It helps alot if you know what each and every word means, as PinYin input doesn't use oral tones as such, if you know what i mean.

eg. for the characters "ni" you actually type ni1
and "hao" you enter hao1

The other characters also share the same PinYin, but has a completely different meaning. On average there are about 27-40 different Chinese characters to every PinYin.
 
Hype.it said:
eg. for the characters "ni" you actually type ni1
and "hao" you enter hao1

Hi, yes thanks. I'm familiar with the convention of entering the number for the tone after the word, 你好 ni3hao3.

But I'd like to print the actual tone marks (e.g. ` for fourth tone) over the vowel, as is the convention in all of my text books. These characters exist in the roman fonts, I just can't find any reasonable way to enter them from the keyboard...

The input method shows me the character with pinyin for confirmation as I enter it... I just want to print that pinyin somehow, even if I have to type it.


Thanks
Pat
 
Ni hao ma? From visiting and working in Southeast Asia for a few years now, I've found that pinyin, in an e-mail, is better off without the accents. but if you're writing a text book. Might I suggest this forum, which should be able to point you in the correct path.
 
patniemeyer said:
Hi, yes thanks. I'm familiar with the convention of entering the number for the tone after the word, ?? ni3hao3.

But I'd like to print the actual tone marks (e.g. ` for fourth tone) over the vowel, as is the convention in all of my text books. These characters exist in the roman fonts, I just can't find any reasonable way to enter them from the keyboard...

The input method shows me the character with pinyin for confirmation as I enter it... I just want to print that pinyin somehow, even if I have to type it.


Thanks
Pat

People don't usually use the the tonal marking in any CWP typing. If you chat with people online and they talk about a particular tone, then they usually type they Pinyin followed by the number. ie 1,2,3 or 4. And anyone reading what you've said, they will automatically know what your talking about from the sentence's contents.
 
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