Features: Colorisation

See tones in a new way – and improve your recall

Using color to improve your recall of tones is a well-known technique. The idea is that encoding tone as the textual color of the toned component will let you use your visual memory to recall the tone information – and anecdotally it works very well!

The Pinyin Toolkit can automatically generate fields containing correctly colorised versions of the reading and the characters. Naturally, the colors it uses in this process are entirely customisable! Furthermore, you can manually color text with the same palette by using a handy set of shortcut keys.

As an added bonus, the Toolkit does its best to detect tone sandhi, and any character or pinyin which is subject to them will have its color lightened – to give a visual hint of that information as well.

For best results, we recommend that you:

• Format questions with black and white characters
• Show colored characters in answers where you are not testing reading or tones