Handling of Mandarin!

Gotta say! I'm blown away by how well the language tool handles Mandarin! It doesn't feel the need to chop up the words a n d a d d u n n a t u r a l s p a c e s, and having pinyin on mouse over is genius! Great job LT.io team. Really, I'm impressed! Truly impressed.

Thanks Clayton! Are you perhaps considering learning Mandarin?

Would love to learn a bit. I think my current attack plan is to use a pinyin based course/audio course while becoming literate and then later merging and consolidating them with the readingtool. Tagalog will always be my main foreign language for obvious reasons, but Chinese is sounding tempting especially with all these neat tools (readingtool.io, this anki addon that adds color coding tone marker to hanzi, etc). Reading tool really handles Mandarin with some grace. Too many websites/webapps are Eurocentric, but I love how well LT handles asian languages in general. 

So with Corona being how it is, my new laptop only has a 13" screen and isn't compatible with my old monitor. Whilst waiting for the new one to arrive (if ever!) I am running into issues with just how small the Hanzi are. Any other LT.io mandarin learners out there have any hack fixes until then :D?

Clayton.Henderson wrote:

Any other LT.io mandarin learners out there have any hack fixes until then :D?

Someone just requested a font size increase for Thai. Are you requesting one for Mandarin? If so, I'll add to that ticket.

edit - how much of an increase are you hoping for?

Yeah a font size increase would be great. I can't zoom in because the website is dynamic and it shifts to a weird mobile view. 

Not sure。。。 I'm assuming you use it, if you have tried it on any 13 inch or smaller screens what would be a comfortable size for you? As the resident CJK expert, I'll defer to you on this one! 

Clayton.Henderson wrote:

I'll defer to you on this one!

Honestly, it's the right size for me now. I could probably increase it about 25% without it being too annoying on desktop. I assume mobile is ok for you. I will also ask that the "used in sentences" text size be increased.

Yeah, mobile font size is fine. Its just my matebook that seems to be too tiny to read.

Ticket written. I don't know if it's an option, but you might be able to increase your display scale (settings>display>scale on my laptop) for a work-around.

leosmith wrote:

I could probably increase it about 25% without it being too annoying on desktop. I assume mobile is ok for you. I will also ask that the "used in sentences" text size be increased.

These changes are done. Also, you may not have know that split/join functions are available, but only if you're the owner of a passage. The good news is all you have to do to become the owner is make a copy. We are now showing the click/join buttons and prompting the learner to make a copy if they aren't the owner. Before this recent change we weren't doing that, so few people were using the functions. The functions are extremely helpful so hopefully more people will discover them.

Clayton.Henderson wrote:

Would love to learn a bit. I think my current attack plan is to use a pinyin based course/audio course while becoming literate and then later merging and consolidating them with the readingtool. Tagalog will always be my main foreign language for obvious reasons, but Chinese is sounding tempting especially with all these neat tools (readingtool.io, this anki addon that adds color coding tone marker to hanzi, etc). Reading tool really handles Mandarin with some grace. Too many websites/webapps are Eurocentric, but I love how well LT handles asian languages in general.

I checked the tools mentioned here and you are right, it makes Mandarin learning seems interesting. Pinyin sounds easy but it is not. Haha