Have you ever wanted to read an online Chinese article or blog post, but gotten frustrated by all the characters you don’t know? Using the Firefox web browser and one of its extensions, you can read and understand any document online that’s written in Chinese.
Firefox is a very secure web browser that’s free and can be installed on any computer system.One of the really neat things about Firefox are the huge number of extensions that have been written for it. Extensions add extra features to the browser (like blocking all ads).
I found a very helpful Firefox extension called Perapera-kun. To use Perapera-kun, just put your mouse over a Chinese character and small window pops up with the definition of the character and its pinyin.
Pera-kun has some pretty cool features. If you hold down the Shift key while mousing over a word you get more information about the character:
The plugin even recognizes compound words:
So download Firefox (if you don’t have it already), install Perapera-kun, and start reading Chinese websites! (Also check out the discussion about Perakun at Chinese-Forums.com.)
Reading and writing in Chinese is not difficult…Practice makes man perfect.