Literary Discussions

I may have found the perfect solution for your problem. I purchased Rosetta Stone Mandarin two months ago. I am age 62. I want to learn more about reading Hanji and also about pinyin. I installed the Microsoft Asian Language feature and am able to enter Pinyin in Microsoft Word 2007. I did find a serious bug, incompatibility using Word 2003 BUT that may be because I have an old Dell Windows XP.  I searched on Youtube on Pinyin Input and found a demo of the following product (here is their home page)

http://www.loqu8.com/   What this product does is allow you to MOUSE HOVER over any Chinese writing and it will pop up a translation. The Youtube demo showed how Google Pinyin (which is entirely in Chinese) will be very user friendly to an English only reader because the mouse hover will translate each button and instruction.  I made friends with Pinyin Joe .... I think his site is pinyinjoe.com but you may google. He explained to me that the older the operating system is the less stable Google Pinyin will be... BUT it is an ordinary program which may be installed and uninstalled easily (that was one of my concerns.)  Pinyin Joe suggested that one set a system RESTORE point prior to installing things like Microsoft Pinyin which once installed cannot be easily uninstalled.  I have joined http://www.skritter.com which offers an online tutorial for both Chinese Hanji and Japanese Kanji.   Loqu8 (mouse hover translator) and Skritter are not free. Both require a monthly subscription fee of about $10.

I have created a Wordpress blog to record my Mandarin studies and links at http://rosettastonemandarin.wordpress.com

I have also created a Mandarin group on Facebook but so far I have only several members.