I came across a book about Spanish pronunciation that used English words and pinyin-like accent marks to demonstrate how English speakers use different tones. It was fascinating because I realized that Chinese tones could be demonstrated in common English, even though we are not ordinarily conscious that we use Chinese tones in English. I wanted to quote the English with the tone marks as in the book, but I lacked a means of easily writing pinyin accents. I downloaded a free program from Sourceforge, and it seems a little quirky, but it can be made to work: Wǒ xué Zhōngwén. It has two modes, one that makes sure that the pinyin accents are correctly placed, and another (used here) that can place the accent marks anywhere: Ī lìke thís! Bǔt, whō knòws? I'll post the book excerpts later, but I wanted to share news about this pinyin program now. Does anyone have anything easier?
