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readingglasses · 07-30-2011, 01:49 PM

So , to answer the question,

using a US keyboard, you might input the character 中 by spelling zhong1 (1 for "high tone"). But as you can imagine, this isn't really necessary for a chinese speaker. If they know the pronunciation of the character, they almost certainly are familiar enough with it to know what it means.
However, it may be useful if they don't know what it means specifically in the context (part of a chain of characters for a longer word) or if they somehow are familiar with it but not its meaning (unlikely).
A chinese dictionary on paper wouldn't be searched by pronunciation anyway, for unknown characters. A chinese speaker would guess what the graphic radical was and try to find the full character under the radical's heading in one of the indexes.
This could be implemented in a computerized dictionary. But they would still have to know how to pronounce at least the simple, radical characters in order to "look up" that chapter/section with all the composites of that radical. Of course, they would know how to pronounce the 200 radical/basic characters. But that still requires some competence.
An ideal dictionary can be of service even to someone who is an incompetent user of the language.

If someone were to speak to them (so not a book/ebook encounter) the word "zhong(high tone)", then they might look up the pinyin pronunciation index alphabetically, or type in what they think they heard in a computer dictionary.

With computerized method, there is also the possibility to draw the character and have the computer do all that graphical recognition and index look up. But it is very ambiguous and error-prone.

Two examples here.
One open source.

http://kiang.org/jordan/software/han...hanzidict.html
(he's not kidding about the stroke order. the program looks up the order of lines, not just the total picture you draw).

(and the pinyin version

http://kiang.org/jordan/software/pinyinime/

One that is not advertised as being open source but is at least freely downloadable (win, mac, linux).

http://www.mandarintools.com/dimsum.html

07-30-2011, 01:49 PM	#2331
readingglasses Zealot Posts: 124 Karma: 9252 Join Date: Jul 2011 Device: (prospective) kobo touch	So , to answer the question, using a US keyboard, you might input the character 中 by spelling zhong1 (1 for "high tone"). But as you can imagine, this isn't really necessary for a chinese speaker. If they know the pronunciation of the character, they almost certainly are familiar enough with it to know what it means. However, it may be useful if they don't know what it means specifically in the context (part of a chain of characters for a longer word) or if they somehow are familiar with it but not its meaning (unlikely). A chinese dictionary on paper wouldn't be searched by pronunciation anyway, for unknown characters. A chinese speaker would guess what the graphic radical was and try to find the full character under the radical's heading in one of the indexes. This could be implemented in a computerized dictionary. But they would still have to know how to pronounce at least the simple, radical characters in order to "look up" that chapter/section with all the composites of that radical. Of course, they would know how to pronounce the 200 radical/basic characters. But that still requires some competence. An ideal dictionary can be of service even to someone who is an incompetent user of the language. If someone were to speak to them (so not a book/ebook encounter) the word "zhong(high tone)", then they might look up the pinyin pronunciation index alphabetically, or type in what they think they heard in a computer dictionary. With computerized method, there is also the possibility to draw the character and have the computer do all that graphical recognition and index look up. But it is very ambiguous and error-prone. Two examples here. One open source. http://kiang.org/jordan/software/han...hanzidict.html (he's not kidding about the stroke order. the program looks up the order of lines, not just the total picture you draw). (and the pinyin version http://kiang.org/jordan/software/pinyinime/ One that is not advertised as being open source but is at least freely downloadable (win, mac, linux). http://www.mandarintools.com/dimsum.html Last edited by readingglasses; 07-30-2011 at 01:53 PM.