Chinese New Year: Feb 7, 2008

Chinese New Year for 2008 will be on February 7, 2008. Here is a link with more information about Chinese New Year.

Two commonly used greeting phrases on the Chinese New Year day are:

新 年 快 乐
xīn nián kuài lè

过 年 好
guō nián hǎo

Here are what I did to get and to display above Chinese words and pinyins. I copied the words from the Wikipedia page. I found the pinyin with tone marks for the first phrase; however, there is no pinyin for the second one.

To get the pinyin, I googled web and found many tools to convert Chinese to pinyin on-line. This tool convert Chinese to pinyin can get pinyin with tone marks. The result is very nice. The pinyins are displayed right above Chinese characters(I may to find some time to figure out how to this is done). As well, this tool looks like that a open-source library (or http://pinyin4j.sourceforge.net/) is used to do the job. Very cool!