Chinese Article Reader Assistant

A web application that helps users read Chinese articles by providing pinyin and definitions when hovering over phrases.

Features

• Input Chinese text in a text area
• Process text to identify phrases
• Hover over phrases to see pinyin and English definitions
• Clean, modern UI with smooth interactions

Setup

Prerequisites

• Python 3.7 or higher
• A web browser

Installation

1. Install Python dependencies:

pip install -r requirements.txt

2. Start the Python backend server:

python app.py

The server will start on http://localhost:5000

3. Open your browser and go to:

http://localhost:5000

The Flask server serves both the frontend (HTML/CSS/JS) and the backend API, so everything works together automatically.

Current Status

• ✅ Frontend UI with text input and reading area
• ✅ Hover tooltips for phrases
• ✅ Basic Python Flask backend structure
• ⏳ Chinese text processing (to be implemented)
• ⏳ Pinyin generation (to be implemented)
• ⏳ Definition lookup (to be implemented)

Next Steps

The backend (app.py) currently has placeholder functionality. Future implementation will include:

1. Chinese text segmentation (using libraries like jieba)
2. Pinyin conversion (using libraries like pypinyin)
3. Dictionary/definition lookup (using APIs or local dictionaries)

Project Structure

chinese-reader/
├── index.html      # Main HTML file
├── styles.css      # Styling
├── app.js          # Frontend JavaScript
├── app.py          # Python Flask backend
├── requirements.txt # Python dependencies
└── README.md       # This file