I’m very new to learning Mandarin and often don’t recognise many of the words even in the Top 100 category.
When I click on a character after answering, hoping for a translation, what comes up is often the translation of the whole sentence or part of it. In the example below, clicking on the characters doesn’t help me deconstruct “Just an ordinary gorilla”!
On the other hand, sometimes it does work for individual words / characters, which I much prefer. It’s not clear to me when and why it does one or the other.
I realise there’s some difficulty in Chinese of knowing when a character stands alone and when it’s part of another word, but it would be great if that function could break things down more than it often currently does.
You can try to use Chinese English Dictionary with Pinyin, Strokes, & Audio - Yabla Chinese for deconstruction (though it sometimes does mistakes); also you can have the google translation of a part of the sentence by selecting it (but this requires that you have a rough idea of where words start and end).
Enjoy learning Mandarin!
I’m enjoying it very much so far. It’s great fun to read the characters, and all the time I spent here trying to decipher spoken French seems to be helping me with understanding the sounds.
I’ve since discovered and installed the Zhongwen Chrome Extension, which lets you hover the cursor over characters to get a translation and the pinyin. It explained to me that
猩 is an ape,
猩猩 is a chimpanzee, and
大猩猩 is a gorilla!
