If you are learning Chinese then chances are that before too long you will want to write in Chinese using the computer. Assuming you are looking for a tool that allows you to write in Chinese as easily as it to write in roman script, then what you are looking for is a Chinese IME (Input Method Editor).

Google has is own IME for inputting Chinese characters http://google.com/intl/zh-CN/ime/pinyin/, and like most things Google it works well. Once installed it is easy to switch between writing in English and writing in Chinese.

The key selling point of any Chinese IME is its ability to provide the exact characters you want. For instance if you are writing about a policeman then you will want 被警察 (bèijǐngchá) rather than 北京茶.

The Google IME appears to claim that it will do a better job at getting to the characters you want quickly and accurately, and from my experience so far it seems to do a very good job of it. It can cope with writing long strings of characters and analyse the whole sentence to determine what characters make sense.

One drawback about the Google IME is that it the software itself is in Chinese– i.e. the terms and conditions, the settings etc are all in Chinese (so not so helpful if you are still a rookie language learner). You don’t need to alter the settings to make it work well, so this isn’t necessarily a problem but if you are of a nervous disposition, or just like to carefully read all your terms and conditions then maybe the Microsoft Pinyin IME would be a better alternative.

See also the previous blog post on wubi and pinyin.

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Learning how to write Chinese characters is hard, and we can use all the help we can get. Skritter (http://www.skritter.cn) is a website that uses some clever web coding to create a novel way of helping you learn characters.

The strongest feature of Skritter in my opinion is its tool for Chinese character writing with real time feedback. This is unique as far as I am aware. When you draw a character the strokes you have drawn ‘fall’ into the right place – so every time you make a stroke a little too short, or forget the hook, or make it too straight – it will show you immediately what it should look like, and then let you continue on with writing the other strokes. Similarly, it will let you know if the stroke is in the wrong order, or wrong direction. It will even give you a hint if you are completely stuck as to which stroke comes next. Using Skritter has taught me that I have been writing the liang of piao liang (漂亮 – beautiful) wrong for months. I had been putting 儿 for the last two strokes instead of 几, and skritter would not let me get away with it!

Skritter is full of other useful features that should aid the language learner such as an inbuilt Spaced Repetition System, Audio reinforcement, and character decompositions, and user created mnenomics (see http://www.skritter.cn/pricing for a full list). Alongside which the studying is very customizable, allowing you to focus on exactly what you need whether that is just writing, or if reading and remembering the correct tone are also important to you.

However, to be honest, I am not going to be using it beyond the free trial. Partly that is due to the monthly fee ($10), but also I have already been learning for a while and I have found a set of other resources that provide almost all the features that Skritter provides.

But if you are new to learning to write Chinese characters, then it could be an excellent place for you to start. Skritter is not free, but they do let you have a two week free trial to experiment to see if it works for you. Hope this Skritter review helpful for those who want to give it try.

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If you are a westerner then learning Chinese characters is going to be hard and require months and years of study. But there are many things you can do to make the task slightly easier. One resource that I have been recently using is a book called “Rembering Simplified Hanzi 1” by Heisig and Richardson.

It is not a cheap book, but the book’s subtitle tells you why it could be invaluable: “How not to forget the meaning and writing of Chinese characters”. You see it can be relatively easy to learn a new character, you look at it, hide it, and then draw it a few times and in theory you have learnt it – but the hard part is remembering that same character later on.

Now Heisig’s approach is slower but more efficient! When learning each character you will spend more time learning it than with the first approach, but you save time in the long run because having learnt it once you don’t forget it, either to read or to write. A remarkable claim!

A further claim of Heisig is that “if you were to study them full time, there is no reason why all 1,500 characters in Book 1 could not be learned successfully in four to five weeks”.

The key to Heisig’s approach is that he gives you stories that stick in your mind that relate the meaning of the character to the component parts. The stories are purposefully vivid and unbelievable, but that makes them very simple to remember, and as long as you remember the crazy story then the character is straightforward to write. Therefore his book systematically teaches characters so that new characters build upon the previously learnt characters.

Below is the link of the book 《Rembering Simplified Hanzi》on Amazon.

Remembering Simplified Hanzi: Book 1, How Not to Forget the Meaning and Writing of Chinese Characters (See all Learn Chinese Books)

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My favourite Chinese character of this week:

Zāo gāo 糟糕

‘Oh no!’ ‘How terrible!’

Have I had a bad week? Well, no, not really, but I did have a ‘糟糕’ moment related to trying (and I use that word deliberately!) to bake a cake in a toaster oven.

Although it seems like a pretty complicated (or messy!) character on first look, breaking it down into it’s two parts really helped me…

Zāo 糟 on it’s own has a number of meanings, one of which is to be in a mess/in a terrible state.

Gāo 糕 on it’s own however, means cake!

Since more than one of my 糟糕 moments have been related to cooking, it seemed a good enough reason to have this as my character for this week! (More on the joys of toaster oven cooking another time!!)

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My favourite Chinese character of this week:

打针: To have an injection

Dǎ zhēn 打 针

An odd Chinese character to have, you may think. But this is my Chinese character of the week for a number of reasons. Firstly, I’ve finally managed to learn it (for some reason, it has never stuck before, despite covering it first about three months ago!)

Secondly, I have had my first proper bout of illness since arriving here, so it reminded me that knowing some medical words can be useful (though I do realise this may not be the most useful!)

Finally, it is actually an interesting character. The second character, zhēn 针 has the metal radical next to something that looks awfully like a needle. So that’s fairly logical. However, when I first came across it, I already knew the first character – dǎ  打. Now the only meaning I knew at that point was ‘to play’. What it has helped me to learn, is that some characters can have multiple meanings (my dictionary gives 27 for dǎ  打!)  Slightly disheartening at times, but better than ‘playing’ at sticking a needle into someone, which was what I first thought it meant!!

(Non language aside – always good to make sure you have all your vaccinations up to date!)

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饿 è

To be hungry

My favourite character this week has to be the character for ‘to be hungry’.

On first look, for such a simple pinyin spelling (è) the character is somewhat complicated, however, I found a good way to remember it is that when I am hungry, I want to eat. Breaking the character down, on the right hand side is the character for ‘I’ 我 , and on the left hand side is the food radical 饣, found in many characters to do with food. So really, it’s pretty logical…at least for this character anyway!

P.S.  if you’d like to see the stroke order of the character, please find it here

And the best way to remember this character is to  practice writing on your notebook or in your web browser by using Skritter below.

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It’s been a while since our last post, however, we are trying to update our blog more often and with more posts focused on Chinese language.  Today, is our first post about learning style.

Thinking about studying fills some people with dread, others may really enjoy the though of a new challenge. Whatever your perspective is on studying, when it comes to studying Mandarin, one thing is almost certainly true – it needs a lot of effort and perseverance.

I have only been studying Mandarin a few months, but I have found it really helpful to consider different tips I have learnt over many previous years of study, and to see how I can apply these to studying Mandarin.

The first is that it is useful to know your learning style.

There is a plethora of research available regarding learning styles. A simple summary is that there are four parts to people’s learning styles, each with opposite ends to the spectrum. Most people will not be at either extreme of any of the styles, but it is something useful to consider.

I’ve put this first as (if you have a choice!) knowing your learning style can help you to decide where you want to do your learning. This is especially important if you are time pressured, as ending up trying to learn somewhere where there seems to be no real connection with your teachers will be a frustrating experience at best!  I like to know details, and the ‘why?’ of things, so to be in a one to one Chinese class setting is ideal, as I am able to ask immediately if I don’t understand something. However, if you really like group learning, a one to one setting may be more of a hindrance than a help.

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I came across this site and was quite impressed by what he did. Richard Sears made Chinese Character etymology available online after years of effort. Through his site, you can see history of any Chinese character.  You can see how each character written in different ancient Chinese character styles: simplified Chinese character (most common used), traditional Chinese character, Seal Character (篆体字-zhuàn tǐ zì), Bronze Characters（金文-jīn wén) which used Zhou Dynasty and Oracle Characters (甲骨文-jiǎ ɡǔ wén), it may not make sense to you, but it’s very interesting to see how characters change through Chinese history.

Richard found it was very helpful to learn Chinese characters by getting a step by step evolution of the character from its original form and understand the meaning of the character.  If you are interested in learning Chinese character and knowing more than what textbook offers. It’s really something you want to check out. some characters you can see: 马 (horse), 鱼 (fish), 羊 (sheep), 家 (family), 人 (person), 男 (male), 女 (female) and much more……

Lastly, if you are like Richard and very interested in learning Chinese characters, Skritter is one of great tools for Chinese character writing practice, I heard very positive feedbacks about this tool, you may want to try it out if you are serious about learn Chinese characters.

Chinese character etymology:  http://www.chineseetymology.org .

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This past week we had a chinese character writing competition among our students at school. Students were allowed to write either a short essay, or just characters from their new vocabulary list from their lessons. After our students had submitted their entries, teachers and fellow students were given the opportunity to vote for which student had the best written characters.

Congratulations to Ruth for taking first place!

For those who are looking to improve their Chinese character writing, one of the most important aspects is understanding the stroke order of Chinese characters. If you’re unsure of how a character should be written, most online Chinese-English tools will have an animation of how particular characters should be written.

The three most popular among our students is Skritter – a web app that helps you learn Chinese characters fast, nciku and MDBG, which they all show the stroke order of characters.

1. Skritter is a web app that helps you learn Chinese characters, with a focus on writing and vocabulary, using handwriting recognition and advanced spaced repetition scheduling algorithms, Skritter is the most efficient way to learn those thousands of characters you’re going to need to tackle one of these languages.  They stated that you can learn a new character every 192 seconds and remember 95% of what you learn. I heard very positive feedback from our current students, you can sign up for an account to use this awesome tool for two weeks for free, no harm to find out. Click to get your two week for free.

2. On nciku, you can see the stroke order of a character by clicking on the button to the right.

3. For MDBG, the stroke order feature isn’t as obvious, but you can access it by clicking on the yellow brush image to the left of the character.

If you have any other tips that have helped you learn and write Chinese characters, please do share them in the comments!

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Writing Chinese characters by hand is a confusing task of memorizing strokes and characters, but the use of computers has made it slightly easier- perhaps an unfortunate blessing since I’ve heard time and time again from local coworkers how their grasp of writing out Chinese characters has regressed because they only now need to recognize characters due to their constant use of Chinese input methods. There are many types of input methods available; some which are based on pronunciation, while others on character structure, character set or a combination of pronunciation and character structure. I’d like to talk about two of the popular Chinese character input method editors (IME): Pinyin and Wubi.

Pinyin (拼音输入法)

The Pinyin IME (拼音输入法 pin1yin1 shu1ru4fa3) allows users to input Chinese characters by typing in the pinyin of a Chinese character, and the Pinyin IME then presents the user with a list of characters with that pinyin pronunciation. The advantage of the pinyin input method is that it’s very easy to learn for Mandarin speakers, since those who are familiar with pinyin will already be able to input Chinese characters with almost no training, which is not the case with other input methods. The Pinyin IME is very popular in mainland China, since children are already required to learn pinyin in school. However the Pinyin IME was created based on the pronunciation of standard-Mandarin so native Mandarin speakers who speak with accents will have a hard time distinguishing a number of similar sounding syllables, such as c and ch, s and sh, z and zh, n and ng, h or hu and f, or n and l. Moreover, Chinese dialect speakers who don’t know pinyin, or speak Mandarin, will not be able to use this input method at all.

Wubizixing (五笔字型输入法)

The Wubi IME, short for The Wubizixing (五笔字型输入法 wu3bi3zi4xing2shu1ru4fa3) allows users to input Chinese characters based on the structure of characters rather than their pronunciation, making it possible to enter Chinese characters even when the user doesn’t know the pronunciation, or if the user speaks a dialect of Chinese. As the name suggets, the Wubi 五笔 (wu3bi3) IME divides the keyboard into five regions, which is assigned a certain type of character stroke, which allows for the user to efficiently write characters with at most 4 keystrokes. Another efficiency in using Wubi over phonetic character input methods, is that users don’t have to select characters from a list of similar homo-phonic choices, and so there’s a greater ability for a Wubi typist to ‘touch’ type without having to look at the computer screen. However, a major drawback to learning Wubi is that it has a high learning curve, and requires memorization and practice for a user to use it proficiently.

Which Input Method?

My recommendation for choosing between these two Chinese character input methods would be to consider your goal for typing Chinese. If you aim to be a professional Chinese typist, and need to input Chinese characters at a high rate, then it may be well worth your time to learn the Wubi IME system. However, if you are a standard-Mandarin speaker, and only need to input Chinese for casual computer use such as online chatting and surfing, then the Pinyin IME system will be more than sufficient for your needs.

Are you a well versed Chinese typist? Share your views on these two Chinese character input methods, or any other input method that you may be using already, in the comments below.

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