Convert simplified to traditional chinese on lessons

One of the reasons why I never used your system for Chinese (Mandarin) was because all the texts are in simplified Chinese for which does not really exist in Hong Kong here.

I request that you add a feature on your site to convert the text to traditional (back-forward) for those that are exposed to the various characters

I’m sure such a thing exists… For the fortunate people like me who live in Hong Kong, everything is subtitled in traditional chinese… I cannot be exposed to simplified here and hence is not practical.

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I suggest you find a conversion software on the internet. If you convert some lessons to traditional why not leave the traditional version in the Script Conversion area in Resources to help the next person who comes along and wants traditional characters.

This isn’t practical and means I can’t highlight and save words properly in the flash card system.

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There is simply not enough demand for this feature right now. Maybe in the future. We have limited resources and have to focus on things that help the largest number of users. I hope you will understand.

I believe there is no requirement for content to be in Simplified Chinese. There may, in fact, be lessons in Traditional characters in the system already. You are more than welcome to upload Traditional Chinese lessons yourself. We can look at putting up Traditional versions of lessons.

I have seen lessons with both character sets (can’t remember which ones though). Unless I’m exposing myself to texts from Taiwan or Hong Kong, traditional characters are of no immediate use to me. However, I think that it would be a good idea to mark the lesson with T or S in the library, so one doesn’t choose the “wrong” texts.

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I live in Taiwan, so I convert the page to Traditional Characters before I read it or save lingqs…And it is SUPER simple. There is an add-on in Firefox called ‘Tong Wen Tang’. When you click on this it changes the whole page to Traditional or Simplified.

If you change it before you save lingqs then those words and example sentences will be in Traditional form…

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https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/新同文堂-new-tong-wen-tang/

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/新同文堂-new-tong-wen-tang/

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/新同文堂-new-tong-wen-tang/

Sorry…didnt mean to post the web address 3 times.

The problem with the conversion of simplified characters to traditional is that there are quite a lot of ambiguities:
干 => 幹乾干
台 => 臺颱檯台
面 => 面麵
… etc …
In general, the conversion from traditional to simplified is a lot more easier.

Tong Wen Tang is fantastic! I tried it and it worked!
I think Mark/Alex/Steve should put a link or notice or something somewhere.

Thanks

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Nothings perfect. I’ve been using it for years and it does the job with out too many dramas.

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It is up to the provider to mark the text as traditional or simplified. We could perhaps use the Accent field. Presumably anything with a Taiwanese accent will be traditional, but we could also add “Traditional” as an accent if others agree.

As to putting link to this conversion resource, the question is where to put it. We could list it as a resource with the other resources in the Import area, but most people will not see it. I don’t know if we can have a notice just for one language. We will see what Mark has to say.

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I’m looking for this myself at the moment, as I’m in Taiwan and ideally wanting to read the texts in Traditional characters. There are also converter plugins (including the aforementioned Tong Wen) available for Google Chrome now, on the desktop. But unfortunately most of my LingQ use is done on my iPad, so I’m trying to just make my learning of simplified characters into an additional learning experience, building on my existing knowledge of traditional ones - even if I do find them mighty ugly. :wink:

I would also like to request a convenient ‘convert between traditional and simplified characters’ function. Pleco dictionary has it and it takes the headache out of trying to do it manually. Also given that Pleco is an extremely popular dictionary; I wonder if it’s fair to say that it’s an expected feature.

My background is that I studied chinese at university (using simplified characters) and then went on to live in Taiwan where I had to make the switch. Sometimes I find texts in traditional and sometimes I find texts in simplified; so while I’m learning, I’d like to see how the characters relate to each other on a 1-1 basis. I think you’ll find more demand for this feature than you think.

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@mejh, rebelrabble - Thanks for your feedback. It’s mentioned somewhere else here on the forum I’m sure, but in I believe late 2012 we spent quite a bit of time trying to come up with a solution to this issue but after many hours of research and several different approaches we didn’t find an obvious fix. At that point we decided we would just leave this and perhaps revisit it at some point in the future. Since then, we’ve taken the approach to only support simplified characters on the site, so that any lessons that are uploaded with traditional characters will be displayed in simplified so that they are compatible with our system.

While we don’t yet have any immediate plans to revisit this, it is still on our list and something that we’d definitely like to do at some point.

I recently started to make original Chinese lessons. I meant to make them in Traditional Chinese, since it’s the Chinese I use here in Taiwan. But I found that LingQ system automatically convert them into Simplified Chinese in Lesson Reader Page. The text itself was not converted because when click edit, it’s still in Traditional Chinese.

Although I know that the majority of learners prefer Simplified Chinese, I still believe people should learn Traditional Chinese( that’s another good old debate, so I will just stop here.) Then I think, okay, looks like I have to provide Traditional Chinese version as “Script Conversations Traditional Hanzi” in Resources. yet it doesn’t work. Texts are there when editing, but it won’t show.

@Alex
It’s understandable that you have to display Tractional Chinese content in Simplified Chinese. I just really hope it’s only only temporary. Could you please check if there is something wrong in my lesson? How do I make “Script Conversations Traditional Hanzi” display properly in my lesson? :slight_smile: thanks. Link here: “Login - LingQ

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