Chinese Characters Tools

I find this tool to deal with Chinese characters is very useful, I called this 字義服務Context Service
The functions for this tool has the ability to:

1. 查字碼 look for character code
2. 字義查詢 look for character meaning/context:
3. 音查字 look for characters from sound
4. 搜索(漢或英) search context records 
5. 漢英-英漢 詞典 CEDICT  Chinese-English Dictionary

To check the unicode representation, the utf-8 code of any chinese character, you can use function #1.
To see the meaning of a chinese character, you will use function #2.
If you want to lookup a character, knowing the syllable or how to spell or pronounce it, you enter the syllable but with the tone 1-9, it will search for all the characters with the same sound and then you can look up the meaning of the character. This is the function #3.
You can also search the meaning, or context by entering the character or english meaning. This is function #4.
You can use the Chinese English Dictionary to search instead of the context database as you can search words (multiple characters) instead of characters. That is the function #5.

Please test it out at Context Service@pcwong.com

Cantonese Service

The Cantonese Service is taking shape. The services include getting the syllable table and through the table you can get the list of character with the same syllable. You can specify the syllables in terms of consonant and vowel to list all characters of that particular sound and even specify the tone to get the list of characters with the same consonant, vowel and tone.
To the get a particular character, you can specify the character with the number corresponding to the order of the listing.
You can also enter a character to obtain the syllable of the particular character.
Most important of all is that you can enter a whole text into the text area and the system will find all the syllables for the entered characters, with sound as well.
You can have the format out to display the syllables, to voice the text one character at a time automatically or to voice each character based on the clicking of the characters.
It is hopefully a great learning tools for those who want to learn chinese in cantonese.

Free Chinese Fonts

One good thing happened, Google releases a set of Fonts for the the world, supporting over 96 fonts and here is the link:
http://www.google.com/get/noto/#/family/noto-sans-hant
Thanks to google.

Cantonese Syllable Tables

Two cantonese syllable tables, one in LSHK, Language Society of HK 香港語言學會粵拼方案 and one in IPA, International Phonetic Alphabet 國際音標:

http://pcwong.org/cantonese/cantonesetable.html

http://pcwong.org/cantonese/cantonesetable2.html

《戒懶文》

仍然記得這一篇很有意思的古文章:

《戒懶文-示諸生》陳獻章 (陳白沙)

大舜為善雞鳴起，周公一飯凡三止。 　　
仲尼不寢終夜思，聖賢事業勤而已。 　　
昔聞鑿壁有匡衡，又聞車胤能囊螢。 　　
韓愈焚膏孫映雪，未聞懶者留其名。
爾懶豈自知，待我詳言之： 　　
官懶吏曹欺，將懶士卒離， 　　
母懶兒號寒，夫懶妻啼饑，
貓懶鼠不`走，犬懶盜不疑。
細看萬事乾坤內，只有懶字最為害。
諸弟子，聽訓誨：日就月將莫懶怠。
舉筆從頭寫一篇，貼向座右為警誡。

重新排列黃錫凌的53韻部

黃錫凌君認定廣府話的53個韻，只分平上去一類，而入聲歸另一類，而這兩類各有不少韻，再從這兩類選擇心儀的韻也不容易，所以小弟嘗試再重新安排這53個韻，而偏向用7個元韻母為主:

元韻母 'aa' 以「呀」為主，呀之下有複音的翳、唉、抝、歐等，而尾音則有奀、庵等字，如此類推。

最新的廣東話輸入法

2014年最新的廣東話輸入法:

中英版本.
http://pcwong.org/gwdw/input8-2.html  英文版
http://pcwong.org/gwdw/input8-1b.html  中文版

同音字，同聲字，同韻字，同調字

同音字，同聲字，同韻字，同調字分別在:
「杯盃胚」為同音字，同聲，同韻，同調，
「榮晶丁冰」為同韻字，同韻不同聲，
「秘氣四」為同韻字，同韻同調而不同聲，
「你似每緒」為同調字，同調而不同聲亦不同韻。
因為中文唔喺音符，只有用英文符號先可以準確地表達正確的廣東話:
 「杯盃胚」為 b ui 1， b 為「杯盃胚」聲， ui 為「杯盃胚」韻，  1為「杯盃胚」調。
 「榮晶丁冰」為同韻: ing。但榮的聲為 w， 晶的聲為 z， 丁的聲為 d, 冰的聲為 b。
「秘氣四」 的韻為 ei，秘的聲為 b ，氣的聲為 h ，四的聲為s。
 「你似每緒」為同調， 調值是5。
 英文符號可以準確地表達聲音，並是常用的規則如 b for boy, s for sea, p for pie 等等。 所以英文可以補中文的不足。
如有問題，歡迎提問 。

一些香港常常拼的姓名

Just want to talk about some common spelling of name in Hong Kong. First "Hong Kong" is a long establish ping jam of  香港 but using the current style from the Society of Hong Kong Linguists, 香港 should be spelled as HOENG GONG. With the tone, it should be hoeng1 gong2. Should we change, I guessed no one would like it.

Similarly for some of the common name like: 陳李張黃何梁曹曾.

陳, using normal Hong Kong spelling, it is Chan. Some uses Chen. Using LSHK Transcription System, it will be spelled as Can. Some people do not like this as it sounds like Kan. C and K sometimes sounds the same and sometimes sounds different as English is not designed purely phonetic. Ch indicates C is not sounded as K actually. Problem comes for the following as well.

曾, using normal HONGKONG spelling practice, it is Tsang. But sometimes TS sounds like Ch as well as in
曹 which someone spells it as Cho and someone spells it as Tso.

曹 in LSHK will spell as cou as o is sounded as ou not or.
曾 in LSHK spells Zang and even in the past Hong Kong people spell it as Tsang and sometimes Zhang.

李 is a common surname and spelled as Lee. Sometime somewhere it is spelled Li. In LSHK, Li is standard as i is sound as 'ee' not 'eye'.

張 is normally spelled as Cheung in HK but LSHK spells it Zoeng. Somewhere it was spelled Zheung.

黃 is perfectly spelled - Wong. But when it was spelled Wang or Hwang, you can tell that it is not Cantonese.

何 is the same, Ho. Pretty standard.

梁 is spelled Leung in Hong Kong. Using LSHK, it is Loeng.

Some consonants are pretty consistent for b,p,m,f,d,t,n,l etc. But for z,c, you will see that sometimes z is spelled zh and c is spelled ch or ts. Without a phonetic standardization, it can be confusing.

Cantonese Input Chinese System

Cantonese Input Chinese System 

Using cantonese to input chinese is now online for everyone to try. It can be accessed through  pcwong.org/cantonese 或 cantonese.pcwong.org . Hope that you will try it and give me some suggestion to improve it. The system is based on 3 clicks, that is, first click the consonant, next click the vowel and from the list of characters organized by their respective tones, choose the character that you like. There is another system for 2 clicks. You just use the mouse (move it around - it is called mouseover in technical term)  to select the consonant, all characters of all possible syllables(vowels) under the chosen consonant will be shown. First click to choose all the characters of the same syllable (consonant and vowel), the second or last click to choose the character desired. If a character desired without knowing the cantonese pronounciation, I have a system using radicals to find the character desired. The system can be accessed here: http://pcwong.org/bs/sj/

廣東話中文輸入

用廣東話輸入中文的網上系統大致完成，現在放在 pcwong.org/cantonese 或 cantonese.pcwong.org 希望大家試下，俾啲意見。
而家個系統用三擊，即喺擊聲、韻、再取調字。
有二擊法，即喺抓聲、擊取同聲同韻同調的所有字，再取需要的字。
如果有字不知其音，另外有用部首取字的系統可以給大家輸入。網址喺:
http://pcwong.org/bs/sj/

The statistical analysis of using the ancient 反切 method

The uproar and outcry of people in HK regarding the standardization of the pronounciation of chinese characters in cantonese lead me to this analysis.

Using a system designed many years ago, t least over 100 years or a 1000 years ago, imagine that the people in China, the king, the emperor, the ruler, the extensive land coverage, the various number of different races and cultures, impact from others, with one and only one standard book used, or forced to use in one province or city, this is insanely stupid.

I am based on the correctness probability, try not to use the word "incorrect".

The system designed in such a long time ago is based on two characters to describe the third character. This is a simple binary tree structure in computer science slogan. The sound of one character is determined by the sound of two other characters. Using the consonant of one character and vowel of the other character, the third character's sound is to be determined. The tone of the third is determined with the simlar way. The first character determine the high or low pitch and the second character determine which tone (平上去入) and for this reason, the total tones determined will be 2x4=8. But cantonese tones has 9 in total and this is one of the failure in the system design. 中入 is missing. (middle tone, entering)

Other than this faulty design, the accuracy can be analyse here:

The probability of having a incorrect sound for one and say it is 50% or 0.5. Because people moved, emperior changed, culture interacted and modified, the original sound will or will not be the same and now it is assumed to be correct or kept in original form with a probability of 0.5. If it is not changed, the probability will be 1. If it is changed, the probability will be 0 (incorrect).

Let's look at this simple logic table:
A  B  C(character described with 反切 method
0   0   0  (changed)
0   1   0  (inaccurately pronouned because of one character changed)
1   0   0  (same as the above)
1   1   1  ( this is not changed if the two characters 反切ed is not changed)

This is a simple AND logic and the probability of having the character 反切ed to be accurate is simply 0.5x0.5 which is 0.25 or a quarter (1/4, 1/2x2)

This is a unit of the binary tree node. Keeping this to describe another character, the correctness will go down to 0.25x0.25 which is 0.0625.  And of course some characters have the sound correctly kept over that thousand years but most of the characters should get a probability of 0.0000001 of being unchanged.

We should see that using this system and claiming the authority of standardization is really STUPID!

If those people educated, they should know a good and sound system like logic and mathematic, we need AXIOMS and THEOREMS.  We should keep the solid base or foundation like some characters (base one) should be taught first and the probability of changing them should be 0. And then based on these characters, other characters' sound will be described through them. With the western influence nowaday, as they are phonetic, we should be able to keep the cantonese to go another thousands years without much changes.

Final Design of Cantonese Input Method

This should be my final design out of all the cantonese input methods that I have previously done. This version should be the easiest, fastest and it should be able to be ported in any other devices. I have just modified it so you can choose the layout in Chinese/Cantonese or English:

If you are thinking of entering "初" which in Linguistic Society of Hong Kong's LSHK Transcription System spells as "co1", you will click the principal "o" first, then you will have a list of all characters will vowel "o" will all different consonants such as "zo", "to", "mo", "go" etc. Also you have all characters with all various tones as well. By choosing one of them, you will get the list of characters having the same consonant, vowel and tone. The last click is to select the one you want and in this case '初'. This system takes only 3 or 4 clicks. I think this is awesome!

You can test it here: http://pcwong.org/cantonese/input8-mc-2.html
or http://pcwong.org/cantonese/input8-pj-1.html

Have fun! Enjoy!

chinese character stroke count

I was organizing all the databases for my "I love cantonese" website. I am proud. I have done a lot to allow users inputing chinese using cantonese syllables.

There are 5 databases that I have created. The first one is the cantonese database which is based on the syllable to choose the chinese character having the same consonant, vowel and tone. It was original in files but I exported the data to the database to allow searching relatively faster and maintaining easier. The second database is based on the first one which allows user to search the syllable of a given character, kind of the reverse process of the first one. Using syllable to look for character and oppositely using character to look for its syllable and allow user to see some characters have mulitple syllables.

The third one is for looking up the meaning of each character and I called it the context database. The fourth one is the dictionary database which I use CEDICT and add and modify it as needed. The last one is the radical database which collect characters under each radical and there are only 214 radicals. The problem is that some radicals have over hundreds characters which make it hard to search for one desired and this is the problem leading me to find the character stroke count as most people further classify characters using the number of stroke count. However there are tens of thousands of the characters which is intimidating to input the number of strokes character by character. Luckily I found on internet a way to do it.

There is a file in unicode to tell me the number of stroke count and I used it, it work beautifully and I will integrate this later to help the search. Please stay tuned.

三六九

終於完成三六九的網上遊戲，細時很喜歡玩，相信小朋友會喜歡。三六九遊戲可以鍛練腦筋。
連結: http://pcwong.org/game369.html

Mandarin Chinese Input

These days I was working on tranlating the system in Cantonese Chinese Input to Mandarin Chinese Input. The first step is to identify the consonants and vowels. There are very many different versions and after researching on the topic, I find these facts are most correct:
21 consonants plus 1 zero consonant meaning that the vowels are pronounced as they are:
‘b’, ‘p’, ‘m’, ‘f’, ‘d’, ‘t’, ‘n’, ‘l’, ‘g’, ‘k’, ‘h’, ‘z’, ‘c’, ‘s’, ‘zh’, ‘ch’, ‘sh’, ‘r’, ‘j’, ‘q’, ‘x’ and ‘x’ is not considered as no consonant. ‘-’ can be used. ‘x’ is like ‘s’ but in mandarin, they are different in terms of emphasis, light/heavy s.
There are 38 vowels and in many versions, only 35 vowels as several vowels do not have their consonant part. The following is a scanned copy of Mr. Wong or Mr. Huang if pronounced in Mandarin:

List of Mandarin Vowels

I organised the syllable table with the consonants and vowels with the single vowels addition as follows:

Figure My mandarin Pinyin Syllable Table

I have verified with other versions:

One Pinyin Chart

Another Pinyin Chart

More Pinyin Syllable Table

Some versions add consonants ‘y’ and ‘w’ but the original scheme is to add ‘y’ and ‘w’ to the no consonant vowels like ‘u’ for ‘wu’ and ‘ü’ for ‘yu’ or even ‘ia’ as ‘ya’. Changing the syllable table makes pinyin more confusing.
Not all combinations are valid syllables and invalid ones are now excluded. Some version do a count to say the total is 412, some says 409 and I got 420 but some syllables do not have characters but maybe I have not found characters under those syllables, they are ‘lo’, ‘shong’, ‘rua’, ‘ruang’,’ nun’, ‘nia’, ‘lün’, ‘diang’, ‘ê’ for ‘e’, and ‘kei’. Some use ‘m’ and ‘n’ as vowels and will come to 420-10+2=412 as well. But with ‘ong’ being ‘weng’, there will only be 411. I am not sure about the 412 total for some version meant those syllables I listed. Please let me know for those who is knowledgeable in the area.
Please test drive my design at:
http://pcwong.org/mandarin/
and http://pcwong.org/mandarin/pinyin.html for pinyin input.
Have fun!

廣東話輸入中文法更新

I have not updated my cantonese.pcwong.org website for the cantonese input methods for a long time. Just recently realize the spacing is too much for the interface for the natural cantonese input method as such:

The new re-design is now using a table of 9 columns instead of 19 columns and getting rid of the diphthongs columns as shown:

Have fun trying it at: http://pcwong.org/cantonese/input/v7.html

cantonese input update

我的廣東話輸入法很久沒有更新，最近心血來潮，看到自然(字弦)版的排版有太多空位:

新的版本我叫它做第柒版:

所有的複音(最多十個)安排在第一行，在滑鼠滑過時才顯示。 請擊點以下網址試試: http://pcwong.org/cantonese/input/v7.html

廣東話輸入中文

中文輸入有很多方法，但又是太多了，有很多人用倉頡輸入，有很多人用九方輸入，但設計輸入的人多是國語人或西人，總是不習慣他們的設計思維。香港人慣用廣東話，所以用廣東話輸入中文是最自然的，所以我設計的中文輸入稱為字弦輸入，取同音之義。中文輸入有用粵音取字，再產生用聲-韻-調的序或流程來取字，也用韻-聲-調的序或流程來取字，黃錫凌先生的方法便是其中之一，繼之韻聲取字用七個基本韻母或元韻，合取複韻及尾韻，令從原本的五十三個韻母變成七個，用七個韻母字開始尋字，變得簡單好多。我還做了拼音輸入及字義輸入或字典輸入的系統，字形輸入暫時用部首的傳統方法去找字，還是蠻不錯的。再者用網上輸入中文，網上用廣東話輸入中文，稱之為網上廣東話輸入系統是最方便有效，因為使用者不需要安裝，有網便成，方便更新改錯，網上有其他的網上廣東話輸入，但我覺得自己設計的是全面一些。
用了電腦，中文輸入的鍵盤不用照英文的鍵盤來輸入!
欲試的朋友可以到我的我愛廣東話網站一試:
http://cantonese.pcwong.org/
並給予意見。

cantonese input chinese online methods

I have completed various online methods of inputing chinese using cantonese pronounciation. You can use the system with or without knowing English. Use pinyin if you know English using the HK method. Use the rythme syllables if you know Cantonese Chinese. Use dictionary to look for chinese using the meaning or translation will do the job. Have fun and try this link:
http://cantonese.pcwong.org

四類性格重温

有人扮矇(傻)，有人扮醒(精)，有人傻，有人精。
扮矇扮傻的人 精。扮醒扮精的人 傻。
舊時歌仔有唱:
「邊嗰話我傻，請佢食燒鵝 」。因為佢稱讚緊你。
傻人不知己傻，也不說己傻 。
精人不說己精 。
陰中有陽、陽中有陰所說非虛。