I am always searching for faster ways to find Chinese characters. I have found two sites where you can draw the characters with your mouse and the site displays a selection of possible characters.
The first one I found was at this site:
http://www.chinese-tools.com/tools/mouse.html
My comments on this site are
- To get a good result you need to enter the strokes in the right order. That is unfortunate, because a lot of users will not have studied or understand stroke order. When I entered characters almost perfectly, but in the wrong order, the result was nothing like what I was looking for.
- Also, not all characters are included. This is also disappointing. I cannot understand why a site would only show the most common characters. Surely the reason someone is looking up a character is because it is not a common character.
The other site I looked at was:
This site has a fantastic character recognition program. Even if I draw the character in reverse order it finds the one I am looking for. No matter how badly I draw the character, nciku is spot on. And it has every imaginable character.
My only qualification is that it is not compatible with Internet Explorer, and I noticed at times it was slow to load or just locked up.
But I really recommend this site. It also has an all Chinese version, http://www.nciku.cn/
If you don’t have a computer on you at all times you can get fast look-ups of characters in my book, Chinese by Numbers.
Available from:
http://www.amazon.com/Chinese-Numbers-ultimate-method-characters/dp/1922022241
http://www.bookdepository.com/Chinese-by-Numbers-David-Pearce/9781922022240
http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/chinese-by-numbers-david-j-pearce/1110603411?ean=9781922022240
Australian sales:
http://www.vividpublishing.com.au/chinesebynumbers/
UK sales:
Chinese by Numbers 