This goes out to all my homies in da struggle, tryna learn Chinese but having a tough time finding ways to learn outside of the classroom. I stumbled upon(via StumbleUpon) Perapera-kun a very lightweight add-on that shows the pinyin and translation of any character you hold your mouse over.
Students of Chinese know that, due to the lack of spaces in between words in Chinese, it's sometimes very difficult to demarcate where one word ends and another begins. The nicest part of the scroll-over feature is that the plug-in shows you individual character meanings in addition to combined-character meanings. For instance, when scrolling over 节目 (jiemu), you're given the definition of 节,目, and 节目. This is most helpful when approaching new words that have a combination of familiar or unfamiliar characters and is executed really smoothly so it's not difficult to use at all. It should be noted that this only works within your browser, so if you're reading a word document in Chinese this won't be of any help.
Very simple and very useful, but aside from the basic translation feature it has a really nice keyboard shortcut (press "S" while a word is highlighted) that allows you to save the word if you're interested in building a vocabulary list for yourself.
Though how useful this add-on will be is proportional to how much time you spend reading Chinese online, it does open up more opportunities for media consumption for the average Chinese student, which is pretty exciting. Trying it out on China Daily was fun and it's much easier than running back and forth to a dictionary, copying and pastying all over the place.
You can read about Perapera-kun here: http://perapera.wordpress.com/
You can download Perapera-kun here: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/3349
The developer seems to update the plug-in frequently with new features requested by users, so feel free to drop him a line if you think it can be improved. Enjoy!
