I wrote an article about using FOSS tools to learn Chinese, but sometimes all you have in front of you is a browser. Let’s just assume everyone is using a full-fledged browser and nothing like Edge or Internet Explorer. I am going to cover Chrome (and by extension Chromium and derivatives) as well as Firefox.
These specific plugins are extremely useful for portable copies of the programs for study only, or for scenarios where you have limited access. I am going to cover two kinds of add-ons or extensions, specifically: Pinyin adding extensions, and popup dictionaries. There are other useful tools, but I feel these two have the best use cases for the average learner and the most widespread impact. I am going to split this by plugin use and go over the plugins individually by browser where relevant.
Pinyin Adding Extensions
I typically feel this type of plugin or function is a bit of a crutch, but even a crutch has a purpose. Adding Pinyin is extremely useful when you’re out of your depth when learning at a lower level, or to just quickly refresh on some problem words or specific terminology. The following plugins were the least invasive for each browser. There were others, but none of the ones I found were particularly worth using for this use case.
Pinyin It – Firefox
Pinyin It is only on Firefox as far as I can tell. Pinyin It allows you add a drop down of Pinyin to any Chinese site when you click the add-on icon in the add-on bar. The plugin is pretty quick, but still took a few seconds to render a random Wikipedia article which was in Chinese. The site flow was modified a little, but it appeared to mainly be the site accommodating the change in text breakdown.
Using Pinyin to read Chinese text can arguably be a crutch, but there are certain times having it as an option is extremely useful. Pinyin It allows you to click to hide the Pinyin again which is useful, but naturally, the article will jump around a bit when you do so from the resizing of text areas. The plugin does space the text out some to accommodate the extra characters for Pinyin too. It puts all of the Pinyin on a single line and makes the character centered over the area with the Pinyin. It feels really solid for just getting a document into Pinyin.
chinese pinyin – Chrome
Pinyin It vs. chinese pinyin
I feel that Pinyin It is both quicker and more efficient for most learners than chinese pinyin. chinese pinyin lacks in features, but the order feels a little better if you’re willing to be patient with the content. They both present different workflows which may or may not excuse the slowness if the workflow fits you better.
Dictionaries
Pop up dictionary plugins differ from some of the offerings I provided in my FOSS tools to learn Chinese article in that they are more efficient in some ways in the browser than a generic dictionary application. These tie in to where a simple mouse over guesses the word but also checks the character. There are some standalone dictionary programs which do similar, but the last ones I tried were pretty impactful on the machine in this mode.
Zhongwen: Chinese-English Dictionary – Both
Zhongwen: Chinese-English Dictionary (shortened to Zhongwen from here on out) is a dictionary plugin on both Chrome and Firefox. I saw no real performance impact between the browsers and both seemed to work well. Both tracked characters almost on par, though Chrome was a hair snappier for general use.
The results were good, but do not appear to be too configurable for source. You can find Chinese to various languages as well, but I didn’t really look into these. The plugin can also export all of the content for easy important into Anki and similar and includes a way to manually query a term in another dictionary page. This definitely makes it a useful tool for study, though the lack of other builtin dictionary support is a bit of a bummer.
Zhongzhong – Chrome
Zhongzhong is a similar type of dictionary to Zhongwen, but it has a few other features. The big difference is that this plugin also allows a “character info” mode which only gives information on individual characters. It offers some other features like reading the character and similar, but none that are really deal breakers. It was about on par with Zhongwen for speed as well.
LiuChan – Both
LiuChan (Chrome or Firefox) is similar to Zhongwen in many ways, but offers some extra features. It offers text to speech as well, which isn’t really on my radar, but it also offers Cantonese pronunciation if you’re learning Cantonese. It is also open source which is a big win in my book. I felt it was also a bit snappier than the others when I took it for a test ride.
Others
There are many other products which do similar, but I did not take the time to compare all of them. I tested the few I was more familiar with and ones with better ratings which were most accessible. If you have had some which work well for you, feel free to contact me or leave a comment below.
Zhongwen vs. Zhongzhong vs. LiuChan
Zhongzhong is not a contender outside of Chrome, so if you want consistency between browsers, I’d say it’s out. Zhongwen and LiuChan (and arguably Zhongzhong as well) both performed pretty similarly, to the point they’re within a hair of one another. The quality of dictionaries and similar comes down to roughly the same. I would pick on the other features, though I personally prefer LiuChan due to the open source aspect of it and the defaults being the sanest for my use.
How Should I Use These?
Since each of the dictionary plugins has its own toggle switch, I feel that they are fine to keep in your browser unless you are suspicious of plugins which can theoretically read your browsing. The Pinyin plugins also don’t really do much until triggered, but any plugin is going to use a nonzero amount of resources. Having a portable browser or a browser you don’t typically use with these loaded is probably the best use case unless you plan to constantly work with them.
Conclusion
These are just the tip of the iceberg for useful plugins and similar, but these are the most essential to almost any study situation. These are all plugins I ended up adopting as well (or at least a subset of them) after testing them out. The ease of search and consistency across browsers on multiple machines makes it a lot easier than loading Stardict or similar on every machine. It also works okay on machines without admin credentials as long as you have a lax enough browser policy.
These plugins can make your Chinese study more efficient, and I feel both are essential at different levels to make Chinese learning much easier. Don’t work hard for no reason, work smart instead. Get the distractions and roadblocks out of the way and focus on working hard on the parts where hard work actually pays off. Tell me if these work for you or if you have any suggestions for similar plugins or different plugins which work better.
Image by kamodayz from Pixabay