These set of dictionaries came about because I was making my own database of chinese characters which I improved and added
to as I learned more and more both about Chinese and making databases. I wanted to make a database so that I didn't have
to keep looking up the same entries in a book form dictionary over and over. I wanted to be able to type a word and have its
definition come up automatically. And the reason I wanted that is because I am very interested in learning to write and read Chinese.
Quite often I'll copy a book that I want to translate and have the tranlsation come up automatically as I type it, along
with pronounciation and anything else I need to know.
I wanted to make this dictionary easy and convenient to use. So I made four versions (there may be a fifth) each sorted differently.
One is sorted by radical, the other by Pin Yin, another by English, and the final one by Cangjie typing codes.
I may add a fifth sorted by Gwoyeu Romatzyh.
The index is just a way of uniquely identifying each entry in each dictionary. Note there is not correlation of these indexes
across each of the different dictionaries.
Traditional Chinese characters are the sets of Chinese characters used mainly in Taiwan, Hong Kong, Macau and overseas Chinses Communities. It refers to the set of characters
still in use in Mainland China before the cultural revolution. Here's the wikipedia article on Traditonal charaters.
Simplified Chinese characters are the sets of Chinese characters used mainly in mainland China, Singapore, Malaysia
and in the United Nations. They were created by decreasing the number of strokes and simplifying the forms of many traditional characters.
While many simplified characters have a resemblance to their traditional character counterparts others do not. Also some characters
remain the same in both the Simplified and Traditional character sets.
For more read the Wikipedia article.
The English translations here are a mix of my own tranlsation based on seeing the word in context, mostly story books which
I translated back into English, or modified dictionary entried from Far East Dictionary. I have both a single word Definition, in most
cases the word above, and also other translations, or other verb tenses, or other word functions. I'm trying to use definitiions that
fit each word as it is most widely used. Becuase I'm trying to automate my translation process as much as possible my definitions may change over time
as I (hopefully) improve my process.
Pin Yin is the most usual method for romanizing the sound of Chinese characters. It uses tone marks to mark the tone of each word.
A similiar system is Yale romanization whose spelling more closely approximates the sound of the characters represented.
This system of spelling the sounds of Chinese characters uses the spelling of the word itself to help non-native Chinese speakers
speak the sound and the tone of the word correctly. While it may be challenging and time consuming to learn the advantages are that if you
remember the spelling of the word the spelling can help you say the word correctly. Also it means you don't have to remember the spelling
and the tone, the tone is built into the spelling.
Canjie is a typing code for typing Traditional Chinese characters. It is freely available on Mac computers and probably also
on windows systems too. It is based on the structure of the character itself as opposed to the way the character is said.
That means that each character (ideally) has its own unique code, which means using Cangjie we can touch type. Other systems based
on the sound of the character require you to select the character from a drop down menu.
Personally I like the cangjie method because it requires me to know the character and how to write it which helps me remember how
to actually write the character when I want to.