Find Chinese characters online by drawing them with your mouse
Posted by site admin on 08 Apr 2008 at 04:42 pm | Tagged as: Chinese, Chinese characters, Mandarin, computers, software
Nciku, a Web site that bills itself as “more than a dictionary,” has a nifty feature that allows users to find Chinese characters by drawing them with a mouse.
As you draw, possible character matches will appear in the box to the right of your drawing, with the results refined as your drawing progresses. You don’t need to know the canonical stroke order to get this to work, nor do your calligraphy skills need to be perfect, as this example shows.
Once you see the correct character offered as a choice, click on it and it will be entered into the search box for the site’s online dictionary. This dictionary feature can handle multiple-character input and will even prompt you with likely choices to fill out your search.
via Keywords
I found I had to pause between strokes while the possible choices were reloaded, otherwise, I’d get an extra stroke drawn directly from the last place my cursor was over to the right-hand box. I also got a simplified character entry when I had clicked on a traditional one from the list.
Any ideas about that? Does it happen to anyone else, or am I messin’ up?
I’ve seen another one like this elsewhere, but I can’t find it again at the moment…
(A moment later) Okay, here are two.
Yellowbridge (click the paintbrush and wait for a popup):
http://tinyurl.com/5xkuoh
Here’s MDBG (click the paintbrush to the right of the text-entry field):
http://www.mdbg.net/chindict/chindict.php
I may have been turned on to one of those by you in the past, and despite my difficulties, a new one is always useful, so super-double-thanks (非常謝謝).
Glad you like our site and the handwriting tool. Thanks for mentioning us.
@Tim
About your issues. It doesn’t sound like you’re messin up. Sorry about the pause, but that would just be do to lag. Are you connecting from within China, or outside? As for traditional characters, we have one entry for each simplified character. Those pages have the traditional character information on it and will be found if you search for traditional characters.
Hope that just made sense.
Dan, I’m connecting from Taiwan: outside of China! I understand the lag, but it took me a few tries before I realized just why things were behaving that way.
OK - just some long-existing app now as a web applet.
I’m still loooking for open-source stuff that works with a tablet … But maybe the tomoe bug in Gentoo will one day be fixed …
Just to let you know, nciku just started a new promotion. Come on over and win some prizes!