039 - Chinese Character Dictionary links 中 文 字 典

Chinese Character Dictionary links 中 文 字 典

Maybe for about 1 year now, I have done my Chinese to English translations of Chinese characters with paper and electronic references.
One of the best paper dictionaries is the Oxford Chinese-English/English-Chinese dictionary. In the middle of this book is a character/radical table to help with the reverse translation.
On-line resources are speedier but they too require a knowledge of Chinese pronunciation, definition or characters to be useful. User input is by keyboard. Searching for the character or the building elements of the character was very (very) time consuming! I have always wondered why no-one has come up with a program where you would write with a stylus on a computer/electronic tablet, the Chinese character and then have the computer come up with the exact character and definition.

I used these resources painstakingly for years. When I got stuck/frustrated, I would resort to entering my query (usually in the form of an image/jpeg) in a forum often half a continent away and hope some merciful/friendly soul would assist me! ... that is until today.

I stumbled on this wonderful website, where not only can you find a character by: certain code, or meaning or pronuciation, but also by drawing. You click on the "brush" icon and use your mouse to "draw" the chinese character. It works very well. This is almost like getting a birthday present! (Note, your browser needs to have java abilities enabled.) The website is
http://www.mdbg.net/chindict/chindict.php?page=chardict

Links to other chinese character dictionaries etc:

Software:
dimsum mandarintools.com http://www.mandarintools.com/dimsum.html
hanzilookup http://kiang.org/jordan/software/hanzilookup/
firefox browser addon MandarinPopup https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/9931 __(other addons include PopupChinese, and Cantofish)
kanjibrowze http://www.stackz.com/KanjiBrowze/kbr.htm
njstar products http://www.njstar.com/
pablo http://ehaton.blogspot.com/2007/02/learning-chinese-pablo-my-personal.html
wakan http://wakan.manga.cz/ (this is the one I understand the most)

online translation sites:
google translate http://translate.google.com/
babelfish http://babelfish.yahoo.com/
PopupChinese Chinese characters to english: http://www.popupchinese.com/tools/adso

Online chinese character/radical dictionaries; Handwriting input:

• chineselanguage.org http://www.chineselanguage.org/dictionaries/index.php?module=ccdict&lang=en
• chinese-tools http://www.chinese-tools.com/tools/sinograms.html
• chinese-tools http://www.chinese-tools.com/tools/mouse.html
• kiang.org hanzidict http://kiang.org/jordan/software/hanzilookup/hanzidict.html
• mandarin tools http://www.mandarintools.com/chardict.html
• mdbg.net http://www.mdbg.net/chindict/chindict.php?page=chardict (click on the brush icon 畫筆 to enable handwriting input)

• nciku http://www.nciku.com/
• popupChinese single character dictionary http://www.popupchinese.com/words/dictionary
• purpleculture.net http://www.purpleculture.net/Chinese-Handwritten-Input.asp
• zhongwen http://www.zhongwen.com/zi.htm

Forum:
chineselanguage.org (this is not a typo) http://www.chinalanguage.com/forums/index.php?

Etymology of a single character:
chineseetymology.org http://www.chineseetymology.org/CharacterASP/EtymologyHome.aspx

Study tools:
chinese mac [study] http://www.yale.edu/chinesemac/pages/study_tools.html
stroke order Dylan Sung http://www.sungwh.freeserve.co.uk/sapienti/bihua.htm
stroke order wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stroke_order

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