Chinese English dictionary

While learning Chinese, I found out that there are lots of free online Chinese English dictionaries out there, but only few are easy to use and offer lots of features; therefore I developed this dictionary to help myself and others learning Chinese.

Features

1. Based on CEDICT which contains more that 23000 entries and UNIHAN which contains more than 27000 characters information. Currently 20370 characters are being used from UNIHAN since the others are neither renderable nor Chinese characters.
2. Compatible with traditional and simplified Chinese characters.
3. User friendly interface with multiple windows for convenience and productivity.
4. Characters lookup by copying and pasting Chinese character or by typing Chinese character.
5. Characters lookup by radicals and number of strokes.
6. Chinese vocabularies lookup by Pinyin, Cantonese and Japanese pronunciation. (Cantonese and Japanese pronunciation is still in development; vocabularies lookup is based on CEDICT, future version will support characters lookup by Pinyin from UNIHAN as well as a Pinyin index table).
7. Chinese vocabularies lookup by English. (Currently is based on CEDICT only).
8. Can be used for Japanese-English Kanji dictionary.

System Requirements

1. Chinese UNICODE fonts (traditional and simplified) installed in your operating system. Click here if you want to know how to install Chinese fonts for your Windows operating system.
2. Internet Browser that supports UTF-8 encoding (Internet Explorer 5 or Netscape Navigator 6).
3. JavaScript enabled in your internet browser. Without JavaScript, the dictionary will not works, it is used for saving servers bandwidth as well as giving fast response time to users with dial up connection.
4. PopUp blocker; If you have PopUp blocker, make sure it is set to allow requested PopUp.

Limitations and Known Issues

1. This tool is not based on English-Chinese dictionary; therefore the English search function will return result different than English-Chinese dictionaries would.
2. Although I had optimized my file format for slower Internet connections; For some queries, the result could exceed more than 1000 entries or 150 Kb; Therefore user with dial up connection; please refrain from inputting general queries like "a" or "the".
3. I use database system that is not optimized for large amount of users; so if the traffic is high, the response could be slow.
4. User with Internet Explorer 5.0 or above might get a slow response while opening a page with more than 700 results. This is caused by JavaScript; Netscape Navigator 7.1 has no problem with this; therefore if the problem persists, you can use Netscape Navigator 7.1 instead.
5. If you use Ms Arial UNICODE font as your default font in your browser and the characters get unread-ably thick, try changing the default font to others.

User Manual

Interface

1. Main Interface: The dictionary has 3 main windows (search page, result page, and character info page); you might need to set the size and position for each window according to your own preference.
2. Additional windows: Radical index page, character stroke counts page, Pinyin index page, and scratch page for the main character page.

How to Search

1. Search a meaning of a character: You can type or paste Chinese character from any source (web pages, word documents, etc).
2. Search characters from its total strokes: If you know how many strokes contained in the character you can put it in; then you can search it in the result page; The result is grouped by radicals for ease of use.
3. Search by radicals: You can look from the radical index page and choose your radical; after that you can see a list of characters with the same radical in result page grouped by total strokes.
4. Search by pronunciation: If you know how to pronounce the characters or word, you can write them with or without the tone number (1 to 5); use u with colon (u:) for umlauted-u in Pin Yin.
5. Search by English meaning: put in the English words.

Dictionary Related Links

Links For Setting Up Your Browser

Basically if you have software to input Chinese characters by keyboard like Microsoft's IME, you have Chinese fonts installed. But in case you have problems, try these links.

• www.chinesecomputing.com This is the easiest way to get all the fonts.Scroll down until you can see "Viewing Chinese Web Pages" section and click the Bitstream Cyberbit font to download, file size is 6 Mb but with this you can view Chinese, Japanese and Korean Fonts.
• chinese.yahoo.com/docs/info/ Contains links to other shareware software to enable typing Chinese characters with your keyboard. The fonts installation tutorial will not work for this dictionary since this dictionary uses UTF-8 encoding.
• www.library.umass.edu/subject/ Contains information on how to setup the browser encoding to UNICODE(UTF-8) and how to install Chinese Unicode fonts for Windows.
• www.alanwood.net. Contains links to download Unicode fonts; download the Chinese traditional and simplified fonts
• www.ouhk.edu.hk/ns47.html. Contains easy tutorial with pictures on how to setup your browser.

Tutorial Links

Below are pre-selected links that contain tutorials or resources for learning Chinese, I hope they will help you.

• www.sinosplice.com/lang/ Funny article.
• people.bu.edu/donmo/pinyin.htm Funny article about Chinese Pronunciation System.
• www.uvm.edu/~chinese/pinyin.htm University of Vermont Chinese Language program; Contains complete sound recordings for Pinyin. Try pressing the back button to go to the main page and look for their class materials!
• www.liwin.com/zhuyin/ contains Zhuyin (bopomofo) to Pinyin equivalent table with sound.
• www.eslisland.com another zhuyin to Pinyin equivalent table without sound.
• abacus.bates.edu/lrc/chinese.html Bates college language Resources center. Contains good selected links.
• www.csulb.edu/~txie/online.htm. Lots of resources for learning Chinese online. Try the grammar section, it is really good!
• www.languagecourse.net just a comparison site where I can put my link :).

Competitors' Link

Although it is against my will to list my competitors' site; but for a fair competition, I put them here so students can use all available tools. They are good; really good; but you now why I created mine right? If you want to put your Chinese dictionary link here, email me and we can exchange our link.

• www.mandarintools.com The owner of this site, Erik Peterson is now maintaining CEDICT since Paul Denisowski, the copyright owner cannot be reached. Thanks to them I can use CEDICT to build my own dictionary.
• www.zhongwen.com A very good online dictionary; in fact they inspired my interface. Contains tutorials and links for learning Chinese language.
• www.euroasiasoftware.com Has free online and downloadable version of Chinese-English Dictionary with sound.
• www.chinalanguage.com Contains dictionaries for popular Chinese dialects (Cantonese and Hakka).
• www.altavista.com Good multi language translator form Alta Vista; Click translate to use the translator.
• cquicktrans; Downloadable shareware with lots of features.
• primezero.com; Contains lots of useful tools besides Chinese dictionary and the first site which officially exchange link with this site.

Next Update

• Pinyin index page where you can see all possible pronunciation and search all characters by their pronunciation.
• Advanced character search capability where you can search characters by their meaning, strokes, radical and Pinyin.
• Adding simple interface where you can refine the search result (and, or, exact match, etc).
• Sound files for Pinyin pronunciation will not be included since there are lots of sites providing those sound recording, besides I myself still have problems with some of the Pinyin.
• Downloadable version of this dictionary will not be provided since doing so will defeat one of the purposes of this site.
• I might provide a page where each user can add new words; other users will be able to correct or add information; this will help us expand the database; I will forward the new input to CEDICT maintainer.