I earlier wrote about how Chinese characters can be converted into text readable for non-Chinese by using Hanyu Pinyin, and in other posts I wrote about how you can use Hanyu Pinyin to type Chinese characters on your computer and on your phone. But how do you type a piece of text with neat Hanyu Pinyin tones? Almost every vowel has an accent on it, and not all of them are met in other languages.
As a ‘quick and dirty’ solution, many Chinese will use numbers to indicate the tones during their typing (e.g. let’s say if they’re on a computer that doesn’t support Chinese characters), so for example: “wo3 shi4 zhong1 guo2 ren2″. Others may choose to print the text without accents and add the accents by pen later, but that’s pretty ugly, and it doesn’t work on blogs and other digital media.
So we want a way to easily convert the above phrase into: “wǒ shì zhōng guó rén”. There are two main methods to do so in Microsoft word:
1. You can install an input method editor, similarly to what you use for typing Chinese characters.
2. However, the editor is not free. Another way is to use a macro in Microsoft Word.
There are also websites where you paste your Hanyu Pinyin with numbers and convert it to Hanyu Pinyin with tone accents.
Check out this article provides links and a good step-by-step guide for all these methods.
Check out our main site if you are looking for a Hanyu Pinyin class.
About Guus Goorts
Guus has traveled widely and has lived in The Netherlands, Ghana, Belgium and Singapore. In descending order of fluency, he speaks Dutch, English, Mandarin, German and some rudiments of Spanish, French and Italian. Guus lives in Singapore with his wife and two young children. He settled in Singapore in early 2006 from his native country The Netherlands. After working in a job for corporate training, he founded Yago Languages, Singapore's guide to language learning.
