Chinese-Tools.com

New to the Web this year, Chinese-Tools.com provides a number of “Online tools to learn chinese or build Chinese websites. Includes annotation tools, dictionaries, and converters for pinyin, unicode, traditional and simplified Chinese,” as the site itself tells us.

Its offerings are divided into these categories:

Tools

The Annotation tool “makes learning to read Chinese easier by automatically marking up the words in a simplified Chinese text with their pronunciations in pinyin and dictionary definitions.”

My favorite, the Calligraphy Studio, lets you easily “get a personalized chinese painting with your own chinese name on it.” Just enter your Chinese name (or any Chinese characters, really) and out pops your customized work of art.

The Get a Chinese Name tool provides a list of a handful of Western names with their common Chinese representations (based on sound).
The Find Your Chinese Astrology Sign page simply reports your Chinese Zodiac animal to you, based on your birth date information.

Converters
- Traditional to Simplified - Enter a block of traditional Chinese text and convert it to simplified characters.
- Simplified to Traditional - Enter a block of simplified Chinese text and convert it to traditional characters.
- Pinyin with Tone Marks - Enter text in pinyin with number notation, such as “zhe4 ge4 gong1 ju4 hen3 you3 yong4,” and convert it to text with tone markings.
  
  Dictionaries:
  - Chinese-French Dictionary - Billed as “The first Mandarin Chinese / French online dictionary. Search Chinese, pinyin or French expressions. More than 20,000 entries.”
  - English / Chinese Dictionary - “Find the chinese translation of an english word or expression.”
  - Chinese / English Dictionary - “Find the english translation of an chinese character, word or expression.”
  The site has been adding new resources periodically, so this keen new entrant to the online realm of Chinese tools looks like one to keep an eye on, methinks. Can’t wait to see what they add next….

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