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You can use this page to email Neil Keleher about Easy Look Up Chinese English Dictionary.
About the Book
Chinese character lookup doesn't have to be difficult.
The easy lookup Chinese English Dictionary makes Traditional Chinese character lookup easy. And no, you don't have to know a character's pronunciation, radical or stroke count.
The easy lookup system is designed to be easy to use even if you are new to looking up Chinese characters.
Once you've found the desired character, each entry includes it's meaning in English, associated words (those are combinations of two or more Chinese characters), Mandarin pronunciation using pinyin, and just in case you are interested, the characters stroke count and radical.
If you have paper calligraphy dictionaries, the easy lookup dictionary makes it easy to find a character and it's radical. You then don't have to waste time trying to figure out what the character's radical is.
The dictionary contains over 6000 character entries and over 11000 word entries.
What makes the dictionary useful however is the navigation. You can easily go from any word entry directly to the entries of any character it contains. Going the other way, any character entry includes links to any word that contains the character (no matter what the position of the character within the word).
The Easy Lookup system is a shape based lookup system. If you have the character in front of you (say in a book, newspaper, menu, road sign etc.) you can easily find the character in the dictionary based on the shape of it's top most or left most element.
The system has been designed to take account of differences in fonts. It's also been designed to make error recovery easy. So for example if you look for a character under the wrong shape initially, the right shape is only the next category over.
Download the sample for a a better idea of the lookup system, navigation and character entry data.
Note the book is only available in PDF format. It has however been designed to be easy to use with even small mobile devices as well as larger computing devices (laptops, desktops).
Because the PDF file is large, adobe acrobat (a free download) is the recommended viewer for both laptops and mobile devices.
About the Author
Although also a yoga teacher, one of the main reasons Neil Keleher moved to Taiwan was to study Chinese, in particular reading and writing.
He once had the thought "how crazy would he be trying to learn to read and write Chinese". So crazy he is.
He first started trying to use a calligraphy brush after graduating from university in 1997. He found books on Japanese calligraphy and tried teaching himself. Later he visited a Calligraphy teacher in San Francisco for a few lessons and then continued to self learn.
After moving to Taiwan he began to learn Cursive style calligraphy (Cao Shu) and has also been learning the old Seal Script.
He spends time trying to read novels in Chinese (Currently he's reading the Chinese translation of Game of Thrones) and that's where knowing Cangjie comes in handy.
He types characters he doesn't know in Google Translate, and then later adds them to his Excel Chinese Database which is the source for this Cangjie Dictonary.