Pinyin Conversion Tool
In order to make the word bank work properly, we had to have a Pinyin conversion tool installed. Thanks to feedback, we have decided to turn this into a separate tool. While there are a lot of similar tools out there on the web, the difference here is that this lets you convert back and forth between numbers and tone marks (all the other ones I’ve seen only go one way). This will be useful to me for the front page to turn the tone marks into numbers. If some of you prefer to use numbers or have applications that don’t display tone marks properly, you are welcome to use it.
Again, this is another great tool brought to you by your own comments and ideas. So do continue to send me your feedback and how you use the resources on this site, and / or what else would help in your learning.
The Pinyin Conversion tool can be found under the Resources tab.
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I think there’s a bug in the Pinyin Conversion Tool. It does place tone marks over the letters, but it does so invariably over the first vowel. Unfortunately, Pinyin has some fairly complicated rules for the placement of tone marks. The general rule, of course, is that the tone mark goes over the most dominant vowel, following the “a o e i u ü” order, which is demonstrated such: qióng, kuáng, luò. However, there are exceptions for the ‘contracted’ sounds such as jiù which should rightly have been jiòu.
See also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinyin#Rules_for_placing_the_tone_mark
Thanks – you’re right about the bugs. It was originally designed as a tool for me to place the numbered versions of the tones on the front page of the site, so I thought I’d make it public. I’ll see if I can tweak it over time to make it more accurate.