Pin1yin1.com is a simple tool designed to help students of Mandarin Chinese learn the thousands of characters (hànzì) of the Chinese writing system. To use it, you simply copy passages from the web into the text box, and they will be annotated with hànyǔ pīnyīn or zhùyīn pronunciation symbols. Click on any character for a more detailed definition with a full list of usage examples. With pin1yin1.com you can get out onto the web and start reading Chinese now!
While maintaining this site for more than ten years, I have received numerous "thank you" messages from people around the world, often giving suggestions or offering support, but I have unfortunately had little time to improve the site. I decided to share the code here for three reasons:
- As a place to document feature requests and progress;
- To give the community a way to contribute code; and
- To give people who depend on the site a backup option in case I stop maintaining it.
As described in LICENSE.txt, I have released the code under an MIT
license. Some files in data/ have their own licenses. Feel free to
use this as the basis for your own alternative websites, apps, etc.
To contribute code, clone the repository and set up local test and development databases "pin1yin1_test" and "pin1yin1_development". Pin1yin1.com is configured for MySQL, but it should work fine with Postgres (though some SQL code might need to fixed).
Install the version of Ruby specified in .ruby-version (I
recommend using chruby), then
run gem install bundler and bundle to get the required gems.
There is a (currently small) rspec-based test suite included. If you have installed the software correctly, you should be able to run it with:
PIN1YIN1_TEST_PASSWORD=password bundle exec rake spec
where "password" is your test database password.
Once you have a feature or bugfix that you would like to share, please send me a pull request via GitHub.
- Procedure for importing dictionary data.
- Deployment process.