I probably shouldn’t work into the wee hours on my hobby project, but in case I do, I finally completed colored pinyin-vowels for night mode. I’m very happy with it 😄 It looks like this:

Also, sometimes I’m quite fond of a transcription. My favourite transcription of the day:

青年一口气讲完，吁了一口气，道：“我是在机场中遇到她，她知道我有事要到日本来，所以才托我传达这句口讯的！”

Qīngnián yīkǒuqì jiǎngwán, xūle yī kǒu qì, dào: “Wǒ shì zài jīchǎng zhōng yùdào tā, tā zhīdào wǒ yǒu shì yào dào Rìběn lái, suǒyǐ cái tuō wǒ chuándá zhè jù kǒuxùn de!”

I assume that the first use of “yīkǒuqì” (一口气) is to say “he finished speaking in one breath”, and thus is a noun phrase functioning adverbially and written together. To my mind, however, the second instance of 一口气 is quite different, “he let out one breath, he sighed” and thus I separated the cardinal number, classifier, noun. Chinese Pinyin, which uses word boundaries, raises many such questions. Questions that don’t seem to exist when writing in one continuous string without word boundaries, without any whitespace in between words, as in Chinese Simplified.

I’m just a language learner, and it still might be wrong, but I feel like I’m about to start to get the hang of it, really close! 🥳🤩

Also, I played a bit with ChatGPT’s Sora app, to create a cover for the transcribed novel. Really, just a hobby, but fun nevertheless!

However, what is a lot more time consuming (weeks and weeks and weeks), is my creation of a Chinese Pinyin-English dictionary for the Amazon Kindle. Argh savage! This is nothing short of an endless nightmare, due to many software issues with the Amazon Kindle and the complexity of the dictionary raw data.

One would think a trillion dollar company like Amazon would put more resources into their e-reader… but I understand that for Amazon the Kindle is primarily a store front, and the reading function is secondary, I’m not the first to complain. Therefore, my entirely novel and out-of-the-ordinary Pinyin-English dictionary might never be fully functional, but progress is made nonetheless!