A modern lightweight mouse-over popup dictionary for Chinese!
After you install this extension you have to reload the page(s) you want to use it on and enable it by pressing the extension's button first! This is only necessary after installing the first time or if the extension has updated.
LiuChan (liú chàng) is an extension for chrome that allows you to mouse-over Chinese to instantly lookup the dictionary. 流畅 (liú chàng) stands for fluency in a language.
It started out as a port of RikaiChan (and its Rikai derivatives) and has since grown into an extension that holds its own with new features and improved performance.
Current Features:
* Instantaneous translation
Just hover/mouse over any Chinese characters and words appear just like that!
* Synchronized settings across all your devices
LiuChan will automatically synchronize your settings for you (requires that Chrome sync is enabled)
* Text input support
Like to use a dictionary on text inputs? No worries, LiuChan has got you covered! As long as an input is active we'll disable the highlighting functionality so you don't accidentally lose focus or remove text you didn't mean to delete. What's more, hotkeys are also automatically disabled when you're typing!
* Theme support
Pick from five presets: LiuChan, Pleco, Charcoal, Paper or Sepia
* Theme customization
You can alter the tone colors of any theme, to ensure you don't have to re-associate the colors you're used to! We've made it easy; use the built-in color pickers and see the changes on the fly!
* Fuzzy search
Use chrome's omnibox to search the dictionary using hanzi, pinyin or just plain english! For those times a word is on the tip of your tongue ;)
* Text-To-Speech
Sometimes you just need to hear it. Have any word spoken out loud in one of the three available dialects: Mandarin, Taiwanese or Cantonese.
Usage:
Mouse Over Dictionary - Simply enable the extension and mouse over Chinese on a page!
Fuzzy search - Type 'lc' in the omnibox followed by whatever term you want to look for (Chinese, pinyin or English), the results will show up as suggestions.
Text-To-Speech - Press T when hovering over a character to hear its pronunciation in the dialect you've chosen
Why is it called LiuChan?
流畅 (liú chàng) stands for fluency in a language. I kept -Chan as an homage to it's origin.
Upcoming Features:
* Wordlists/Anki support
* Cantonese support
* Fuzzy search optimizations (it's not fast or accurate enough at the moment)
Feel free to put in your feature requests in the reviews or on github!
Changelog:
v1.1.4
*Fixed a serious bug affecting only new users of LiuChan, where the popup would not show up unless the user changed at least one option in the options page. Didn't catch this for a long time probably, because I didn't clear my synched settings for a long time! Oops...
*Fixed a bug where if a page unloaded the popup element (usually through some funky dynamic loading) the popup wouldn't get recreated.
v1.1.3
+If you try to enable Liuchan on a tab that does not have the content script running yet, it will give you a helpful reminder that you have to reload the tab first.
*Massively improved performance. Memory usage decreased by 50% and dictionary lookup is ~40 times faster!
v1.1.2
*Fixed z-index issue with notepad and popup overlapping
*Notepad now syncs between tabs and windows
*Minor styling tweaks
v1.1.1
+Notepad functionality! Right-click the Liuchan button to access (can be opened on any webpage)
*Fixed bug where the icon wouldn't show the actual status (red when actually disabled)
*Fixed bug that caused tabs in different windows to not be activated
v1.1.0
+More theme customization! You can now change the background, border, border radius, drop shadow and more. Some other options such as scale on zoom and color customization have been added as well.
*Liuchan has changed massively under the hood. Now using ES6, lots of refactoring. Doesn't mean much for the end-user, but it should mean updating and adding new functionality becoming much easier! A slight performance increase as well.
*Updated CEDICT to newest version (2017-12-06)
v1.0.3
+Theme Customization!
*Input compatibility has been improved; Liuchan no longer takes away focus or highlights text if an input is active.
*Various optimizations. Gotta shave off those CPU cycles
*Content scripts now only hold the options they need, instead of all of them
*The dictionary is rebuilt on the fly when you change pinyin type, meaning you don't have to reenable Liuchan
*Popup Delay has been fixed
v1.0.2
+Added Text-To-Speech for Mandarin, Taiwanese and Cantonese
Appropriate settings have been added to option page
*Options page save successful message now scrolls with page
*Fixed copy to clipboard function
*Altered options page CSS
*Upgraded key handling code
v1.0.1
*Fixed a bug where certain characters weren't able to match a definition
*Altered the CSS slightly to improve aesthetics
v1.0
*Initial Release
Latest reviews
- (2023-07-26) Latane Bullock: This worked amazing out of the box. Exactly what I was looking for to help me learn some new characters.
- (2022-06-24) Teksong Eap: Excellent app, very lightweight, customizable and much faster than Zhongzhong or the other ones. An absolute winner.
- (2022-02-16) Xinyuan Li: I'm a Mandarin teacher. I compared several similar APPs and decided to recommend this one to my students. I like most of it's features. The biggest complain I have is the name. It is an APP for learning Chinese and I do not understand how it spells its own name wrong in pinyin. It should be liuchang, not liuchan. Also liuchan means miscarriage so it is a really bad name for an APP.
- (2021-06-24) Dave Hsu: like the option of letting user set custom character and tone colors. perfect!!
- (2021-04-03) T: Quick and easy install, instantly does what is supposed to do. Very much appreciated!
- (2020-12-30) Emre KUŞLU: It's perfect.
- (2020-12-28) Nicole Sung: Excellent. The only chinese dictionary extension with working TTS.
- (2020-10-21) ヂィラン: works consistently, and very useful there are quite a few apps like this, but not all of them work, but this on was able to work all the time for me, i click it on and i can see the translations when i hover the mouse over every time, works great.
- (2020-10-10) Emanuele Raini: Simply awesome. Works great!
- (2020-06-23) Soraya J. Del Amor: Muchas gracias por crear esta app, es increíble.
- (2020-01-31) An Đăng Nguyễn: This is excellent! All of the things useful for my learning Chinese is here. I just have 1 issue: It would be great if "auto-start when Chrome is opened" is included. Every time I learn Chinese I have to turn it on, which is a really pain : ( Hope that you can include it in future versions. Thanks a lot!
- (2019-08-13) xⓍ x: Thank you so much for creating LiuChan. The extension works great for me, the only feature not in there that I can think of is the ability to change the font size (it's a little small on my screen). ...Actually, that and the option to add custom user dictionaries (e.g: stardict-type dictionary - I'd love to use Chinese-Japanese or Chinese-Korean) but this is probably a tough call 😅
- (2019-08-06) Tora GuuMoonRyoung: This extension is almost perfect. For some reason it doesn't have english meaning of some very simple chinese symbols. It is kinda odd....
- (2019-01-02) John D: Why are there two extensions with the same icon & same name? I like the other version more as it also has the Cantonese (Jyutping) dictionary, but the text to speech function on that version doesn't work. p.s. Hope this extension (with Jyutping and functioning TTS) could be made available for Firefox users as well. Thank you
- (2018-12-05) Mac Stringer: Much better than any of the alternatives!
- (2018-09-16) Geza Kovacs: My favorite popup chinese extension as it allows me to change the tone coloring scheme. Two bugs: 1) the zhuyin is sometimes wrong. For example, for 魔 it should show ㄇㄛˊ but instead shows ㄇㄨㄛˊ. 2) It sometimes misses some words, for example 捨 doesn't show anything when hovered over at all, and this is a very common character - you can reproduce this bug by going to https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/捨棄
- (2018-08-28) Dimi Chris: I've been using various popup dictionaries for Chinese. I think this one is the best around! The only feature I would really like to see is the option to change the size of the font in the popup or the font itself.
- (2018-06-20) Cole Lawrence Peltier: This software is perfect! I always use Pleco Screen Reader (cursor translator) on my phone and combine it with WeiBo so that I can learn based on real people using the language. LiuChan is very similar and can be tweaked in "Options" quite a bit to the comfort of the user. I really appreciate this Chrome Extension. I might end up using this more than Pleco. One feature that would be cool would be text resizing or font-changing the Hanzi. It's slightly larger than the usual text on my screen, but it would be nice to be able to change it too.
- (2018-01-13) Alfred Reinold Baudisch: This is AMAZING.
- (2017-11-29) yannan cai: Great app. Super easy to use. You just hover your mouse over the characters. I was waiting for such an app for so long. If it doesn't work at first it might be because you have to click on the extension button(whatever you call it thing) so it turns from grey to red, and then refresh the page. At least that's what I had to do to get it to work. THANK YOU SO MUCH FOR THIS APP.
- (2017-11-15) Robin Wong G: 一级棒
- (2017-11-04) MannyF: Amazing. Finally a decent Chinese pop-up for Chrome that works in text input boxes. This is THE best Chinese pop-up out there, of any web browser, not just Chrome, and it's the reason I'm finally ditching Fire-bloat-fox and switching to Chrome. It really woks beautifully: it's instant, clean, and I love the fact that I can configure custom pinyin tone colors. My only small complaint is that when hovering hyperlinks which Chinese text, the link tool tip covers the Chinese popup. I'm sure this will be fixed in a future release. Also a small suggestion, in addition to themes, it would be nice to be be able to customize the background. I like the Pleco theme clean look and feel, but the thick blue bands at the top and bottom waste space. I wish I could just have a simple white rectangle with a thin border around it (both with custom colors), and maybe an option to choose between round and square corners. Really, a great contribution to the Chinese-learning community. Thank you!!
Statistics
Installs
6,000
history
Category
Rating
4.8611 (36 votes)
Last update / version
2021-12-19 / 1.1.6
Listing languages
en