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Abstract
Pinyin is used to enter Chinese characters into computers. Pinyin uses the Latin alphabet only to spell Chinese pronunciation, and the alphabet is pronounced differently from English. It is not easy for Korean people, as a foreigner, to distinguish Chinese pronunciation and correctly spell the pronunciation of Chinese words with the Latin alphabet. In this study, Latin alphabet combinations of Pinyin initials and finals were converted into those spelled with Hangeul pronunciation. Using the converted combinations, Pinyin pronunciation written with the Latin alphabet in CEDICT was converted into Hangeul pronunciation to create CEDICT-HG database. Based on the CEDICT-HG database, a system for searching Chinese words with Hangeul pronunciation was implemented on mobile phones run on the Android platform.
Key Words: CEDICT, CEDICTJHG database, Chinese retrieval system using Hangeul, Conversion of Chinese phonetic transcriptions, Searching Chinese with Hangeul pronunciation on mobile phones.
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1.Introduction
Pinyin, as the official Romanization system for Standard Chinese used in mainland China, Malaysia, Singapore and Taiwan, is used to enter Chinese characters into an electronic device. It is composed of three elements: initials (21), finals (36), and tones. An initial is a consonant that begins a syllable, and a final is the rest part of the syllable. The tone of a sound is, like consonants and vowels, its particular quality, and makes a high or low pitch in a Chinese syllable. Although some Chinese words consist of the same initial and final, they can have different meanings depending on their tones. There are four main tones in Standard Chinese that foreigners generally learn [1,2].
When a certain pronunciation is entered into a computer using the Pinyin system, all words that are pronounced that way are displayed, and users can choose among them. Pinyin uses the Latin alphabet only to spell the pronunciation of Chinese characters, and the alphabet is pronounced differently from English [3-5]. Pinyin is a suitable input method for Chinese people who have learned Pinyin systematically, but it is not easy for Korean people who study Chinese as a foreign language to use the Pinyin system. Korean people are confused when spelling some initials using the system, and words are often spelled wrong [6, 7]. For instance,...