Book Two of the Third Grade is Done

It took quite a bit longer than I had expected, but we finally finished the Book Two of the 3rd grade today with a review class. My daughter had exciting soccer games in both yesterday and today, so she is tired by the time we had our class in the evening. We did not do a whole lot in our review.

nciku: A New Online Dictionary

There are certainly quite a few online dictionary and translation tools for Chinese language. But most of them did not solve the problem that one could only look up a Chinese character by its pinyin, which requires the knowledge of the character's pronunciation.

In a traditional Chinese dictionary, one could look up a character either by its pinyin (which is curiously ordered by the English alphabet) or by its radicals and strokes. The latter method is much more useful when encountering an unknown character while reading a book.

Through Pinyin News, I learned a new online dictionary which provides this most important feature: the nciku. It allows the search of characters by radicals, ordered by stroke counts just as a traditional dictionary.

What's more, it also allows one to "write" or draw a character with the mouse. As one draws the character, a table of potential matches are displayed and updated for selection.

The user interface seems to need a little bit of work, but it's a pretty nifty tool.