One hard part about learning Chinese is looking up new characters in a dictionary.
If you find the character online, it’s not that hard. You just copy and paste it into a dictionary like dict.cn, and you have your answer.
If you come across a new character in printed form, however, it’s not quite as easy. You have to know (or be able to deuced) the main radical, stroke, and count and then look it up in a paper dictionary (which is often a three step process). It is very time consuming for a noob such as myself.
I found a really neat web application / dictionary that lets you search the dictionary by drawing the character.
While you still have to know the stroke order, it’s far easier then doing it the paper way (and it seems to be pretty good at guessing what you’re doing as long as you draw it mostly correct).
It’s called Nciku.
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Thanks for the link, Rob… that’s really cool!
For a printed book, have you tried “Chinese Character Fast Finder”, by Laurence Matthews? It’s laid out much better than other dictionaries I’ve seen, and focuses more on quick identification than on full set of meanings and compounds.
tx, jd
Hey John,
No, I’ve never heard of that book before, but on top of your recommendation it seems very highly rated on Amazon:
http://www.amazon.com/Chinese-Character-Finder-Laurence-Matthews/dp/0804836345/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1197674723&sr=8-1
I shall add it to my holiday wish list :-D
谢谢您！
heading to China yet? Get your books there for pennies compared to US prices. I picked up a English to Chinese dictionary that has both pinyin and simplified in it for like 1 US dollar. Sometimes its the only way I can communicate with my mother-in-law who is here visiting now. :)
wan an!
DK
我是中国人，我在学英语，互相交流。
联系我：nshen121(at)gmail.com
Are you interested on a Portuguese Localization of WebArchive Extractor?
Glad you like the handwriting tool! If you didn’t know about nciku before, we just made a bunch of changes. You can check out the full list here:
http://blog.nciku.com/blog/en/?p=9