A free Chinese Language Learning Aid with Web Browser
Smart Chinese Reader (SmartCR for short) is a free program to help you learn Chinese language through deep reading.
It provides Chinese word segmentation, Chinese part of speech tagging, Chinese to English translation, example sentence search, and text to speech conversion.
You can pick up any Chinese news, stories, or essays interesting to you on internet, and use Smart Chinese Reader to explore them.
Compared with dictionary apps, it lets you gain more Chinese language knowledge (meanings and usages of Chinese words, patterns and even rhythms of Chinese sentences) from a text,
rather than just to get through the text.
It makes your Chinese learning more effective.
Smart Chinese Reader offers several advantages over traditional Chinese learning programs:
Built-in web browser with popup Chinese dictionary.
Traditional learning programs follow a fixed curriculum for every learner -- regardless of your proficiency or needs.
As you use Chinese with Smart Chinese Reader, choose what you want to learn and take control by focusing on only what's important to you.
Smart Chinese Reader offers a built-in web browser with popup Chinese dictionary on mouseover.
You can read any Chinese web pages easily now!
Simply hover your mouse over a word to pull up its definition right on the page.
Better still, you can pick some sections in web pages to study in depth with other learning aids of Smart Chinese Reader described below,
including segmented Chinese text, POS (part of speech) tagging, English translation, Mandarin pronunciation, example sentences, HSK ranking, and review of difficult Chinese words.
For texts in other file formats, copy them from their respective applications and paste them into Smart Chinese Reader, then they will become easier to read and study.
Suitable for beginners and advanced learners.Smart Chinese Reader provides two view of Chinese reading: the Beginner view and the Advanced view.
The Beginner view is designed for beginners and elementary Chinese learners. It offers several reading aids, including Chinese word segmentation, part of speech tagging, and Chinese translation.
For intermediate or above learners, the Advanced view is more challenging, which forces them to parse a Chinese text in its original form.
Of course, one would not use the Beginner view or the Advanced view exclusively.
For example, you may read texts in the Advanced view normally,
and when a sentence presents difficulties, go back to the Beginner view by clicking the right arrow next to the sentence to get more helps on it.
Higher accuracy of Chinese word segmentation.
Word segmentation is a necessary first step in Chinese language processing, and it is a difficult problem.
Let's look at an example "日本是亚洲内人口老化最严重的国家" with the focus on the subsequence "内人口".
In this sentence, "内" is a word in itself, which means "inside".
"人" and "口" form a word together, which means "population".
Traditional programs use dictionaries to recognize words.
By consulting the dictionary they find "内人" is a word, and then "口" is a word in itself.
Here is the wrong segmentation by one traditional program:
Our Chinese word segmentation algorithm is based on the statistical natural language processing technology.
It parses a sentence as a whole.
A sentence usually has huge amounts of segmentation options, our algorithm chooses the one which has the largest global probability, thus achieves a higher accuracy.
Furthermore, it can recognize new Chinese person names and place names in a sentence correctly.
By "new" we mean words that are not listed in the dictionary.
In the example "黄保中利用职务上的便利为他人谋取利益", our program recognizes "黄保中" as a person name.
One traditional program incorrectly regards "保" and "中" as two country, Bulgaria and China respectively.
Color part of speech notation for Chinese words.
Parts of speech (POS) of Chinese words in a sentence are marked with colors.
The syntax structures of Chinese sentences are quite different from those of English sentences.
With the color notation, you can familiarize yourself with the Chinese syntax in a short time.
Here, the person name 李嘉诚 is displayed with the bold font in blue, the verb 出生 is in red, the place name 中国 东南部 is in blue and underlined.
Chinese-English dictionary.
Want to know the definition of a word? Just click the mouse on the word either in the Beginner view or in the Advanced view to bring up the Chinese dictionary entry.
Dictionary on hover has been considered.
Although it saves users a click, it was not adopted finally, because users tend to trigger the dictionary on accident when their mouse moves over the text.
Example sentences lookup.
Double-clicking on a word either in the Beginner tab or in the Advanced tab will bring up the Examples tab in which example sentences containing the current word are provided.
Example sentences offer a wealth of information and give you a sense of how the word is used.
Each example sentence is a Chinese-English sentence pair, in which the Chinese sentence is original and the English sentence is its translation by human translator.
Because sentences were originally conceived in Chinese, it ensures the authenticity of Chinese word usages.
Chinese to English translation.Smart Chinese Reader can translate a whole Chinese sentence into English.
It uses the phrase-based statistical machine translation technology
and incorporates a huge translation model produced from a Chinese-English bilingual corpus with 5 million sentence pairs.
So our full text translation is performed locally.
Some traditional programs can only provide word-to-word translation based on a Chinese-English dictionary. The result is poor and sometime meaningless.
For example, in the sentence "吸烟对健康有害", "对...有害" should be treated as a phrase in translating. "对" has more than 10 meanings.
Programs based on dictionary just pick the first one as the translation of "对".
The result of one such program is as follows:
The translation of our program is as follows:
Some other programs get Google or Bing to translate Chinese sentences.
Sending text and receiving translations from third-party web services over the Internet are slow and tedious, and may be a security issue.
Chinese-English phrase mapping.
While moving the mouse over each Chinese phrase in a Chinese sentence, the corresponding phrase in the English sentence is highlighted, and vice versa.
This allows you to learn translation at the phrase level.
Pronounce Chinese naturally.
Seeing Chinese sentences and hearing them read aloud is a powerful combination to quickly learn Chinese.
Click the Speaker icon next to a sentence, and you will hear the sentence pronounced in your choice of Chinese voices.
Words in the sentence are highlighted one by one when they are being pronounced.
This allows users to follow and practice speaking Chinese in a nature way.
Speak Mandarin and Cantonese.Smart Chinese Reader allows voice customization.
There are various local accents in China.
Are you going to study in Tsinghua University?
Then a Mandarin voice based on a native speaker from Beijing is the best choice.
Listen to the sentence "第29届奥运会在北京圆满闭幕" read by Smart Chinese Reader in Beijing-accent Mandarin:
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Do you work or live in Taiwan?
Selecting a Mandarin voice based on a person from Taipei would be more helpful.
Listen to the same sentence read by Smart Chinese Reader in Taipei-accent Mandarin:
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Are you planning to visit or live in Hong Kong, Guangdong, or Shenzhen?
Choose the Cantonese voice. Listen to the same sentence read by Smart Chinese Reader in Cantonese:
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Smart Chinese Reader even lets you adjust speech rates.
Slower rates allow novice learners to hear subtle tone differences; faster rates simulate conversational Chinese.
Voice customization is performed in the Settings dialog:
To-learn word list and quizzes.
When you encounter a word that is difficult to remember or you just need to make sure that you study the entry, mark it as to-learn.
You can study them later in an effective way in the Review view where quizzes on the definition and usages of this word are presented.
Known word list.
Having a clear picture of what you have known and what you haven't known is key to learning.
While reading Chinese texts, you can mark a word as known if you feel you have been familiar with it, and the word is added to the known word list.
Your known words are highlighted in the Advanced tab and the HSK tab to measure your mastery of a Chinese text or a particular HSK level.
Statistics and color notation of HSK levels.
In the Advanced view, the number of total words and words at different HSK test (Hanyu Shuiping Kaoshi, Chinese Proficiency Test) levels are figured out.
This indicates the difficulty of a Chinese text.
Furthermore, the Advanced view can differentiate HSK exam levels of words with colors, and let learners plan their studies easily.
Prepare for HSK test.
The HSK tab provides vocabularies of HSK 1, HSK 2, HSK 3, HSK 4, HSK 5, and HSK 6, in which known and to-learn words are labeled with color borders.
It provides a clear picture of which HSK words you have been familiar with, which HSK words you haven't, and which you want to study further.
For any HSK word you don't know, you can click on it to bring up the Chinese dictionary to see its definition, and double click to find its example sentences.
This let you prepare HSK exam easily.
Compatible with traditional Chinese characters.
The simplified Chinese character equivalent is displayed after each traditional Chinese character.
This feature gives you opportunities to read news form mainland China or Hongkong or Taiwan more conveniently.
For example, you can hear different opinions about the recent affair "占中" from various websites, whether they are based on mainland China or on Hongkong.
The following screenshot is a paragraph about the famous Hongkong businessman 李嘉诚:
Resizable window for Chinese reading.
When you manually adjust the size and placement of the window of Smart Chinese Reader, it memorizes that size and always reopens the window to that same size.
It is more convenient to read a Chinese text on this software than on cell phone APPs, especially when the text is long.
Changeable font sizes of Chinese characters.
The font sizes of the Beginner tab, the Advanced tab, the Examples tab, and the Known tab can be adjusted by the user.
If you find Chinese characters or English characters are too small to read, you can enlarge them to 125%, 150% ... to make the text clearer.
This is helpful for people with bad eyesight.
Openness.
The results of Smart Chinese Reader, including segmented Chinese sentences, and Pinyin etc. can be selected and copied.
Paste Chinese text (in simplified Chinese characters or traditional characters) or Pinyin into your email, IM, or document while communicating with Chinese friends or customers.
No Internet connection required.
Our huge Chinese English translation database used for machine translation and corpus used in example sentence search are shipped with the software and operate locally (offline).
That's especially valuable when working in areas with poor or non-existent web connections.
