Hànzì Analyzer

What is it?

Hànzì Analyzer is a reference tool for those learning spoken and written Chinese. It presents all the characters you would find in a modern Chinese dictionary in a searchable and explorable fashion—providing various methods for looking up characters and making translations, and providing tables that convey statistical information about the language.

You can choose to work with simplified or traditional characters (both are always displayed for comparison purposes; everything's color-coded), and you can choose between Mandarin and Cantonese.

Hànzì Analyzer makes the entirety of the Chinese characters accessible to someone learning Chinese (such as myself). By accessible, I mean that I can find any character, either searching by sound (easier) or by radical (a bit harder). One of the best ways to build knowledge of Chinese is to look up characters. The more you search and explore, the more you will learn about strokes, radicals, and phonetic components.

I wrote Hànzì Analyzer for myself and hope that others may find it useful. It's the result of me pulling together various resources into a tool that helps me build my Chinese vocabulary and that enables me to use Chinese characters in my own documents. The resource I've depended on most is the Unihan Character Database made available by The Unicode Consortium.

A few details

Hànzì Analyzer was designed to display Chinese characters in a very large font, so you needn't strain your eyes trying to become familiar with the various strokes and how they're used, and also so you can appreciate and learn the appearance of the characters. The font point size is customizable, as is the font used. By default, a character is displayed along with its radical, stroke count, pronunciations, and a rudimentary definition. For example:

You can copy-and-paste from Hànzì Analyzer into a word processor, making it a kind of input-method editor (IME) that lets you search by radical and stroke count.

Character-based searching

If you’re looking for a particular Chinese character, you can search by sound or by various combinations of radicals and stroke counts.

Word-based searching

You can translate English words into Chinese terms.

You can translate Chinese terms into English by supplying their romanizations, with or without a pitch indication. For example, typing dian hua (searching in Mandarin) will find telephone.

Note: The dictionary feature is rather clunky and not very useful (it doesn't know about neutral tones; see ahead). Rather than disabling it, I just leave it enabled. It comes in handy now and then.

Statistical information

Hànzì Analyzer offers an array of statistical analysis tools. Perhaps you’d like to know which sound is the most common sound (from a dictionary standpoint, not a usage standpoint). Perhaps you’d like to know which stroke count is most common. Perhaps you’d like to know which sounds are used with the most number of pitch inflections. A number of interactive tables are available that let you explore this kind of information.

Note

As this has all been eked out in my spare time, it contains some inelegancies. Perhaps the most important hint I can offer is: Click on a character with the second mouse button to get to some of the most useful features.

Complete Feature List

Limitations of character-based study

Many characters have different pronunciations depending on how they are used.

This tool simply lists out the different possible pronunciations without knowing the correct one.

Many characters are pronounced with a neutral tone when they appear at the end of a multi-character term.

I find this to be perhaps the most difficult aspect of building vocabulary, and, oddly, I don't think I've ever seen this acknowledged elsewhere. It's challenging enough to remember pronunciation and tone of each character. Additionally, you need to remember if a given word ends in a neutral tone.

Even if you had a superhuman ability to memorize pronunciations and tones of characters, you can throw all that out the window when it comes to correctly pronouncing terms that use those characters.

And when you first learn a character in its neutral tone form, you haven't yet actually learned the character; you can't yet correctly use the character elsewhere when its tone does matter, until you learn its tone.

A similar situation exists when learning by listening to third-tone characters than have been modified to be spoken with a second tone (sandhi tone modification). You will, in fact, learn the wrong tone if you learn by listening.

Here's a lookup tool that knows a lot of terms, including when to use the neutral tone:

http://www.pin1yin1.com/

When all else fails

Now you can look up characters on the web by drawing them with a pointing device:

http://www.nciku.com/

Prerequisites

An existing strong interest in (and some experience with) the Chinese language is assumed. Also assumed is knowledge of the following:

Romanization systems (e.g., pinyin for Mandarin).
Having Chinese fonts installed.
Looking up characters by radical and stroke counts.
The significance of some older (but still prevalent) character encoding standards, such as GB2312 and Big5.

A few basics

Hànzì Analyzer is not Web-based. It's a Windows application. I originally wrote it 1997 and began updating it in 2007.
It supports Mandarin and Cantonese. It uses the pinyin system for Mandarin and the Yale system—with standard modifications—for Cantonese.

Download Hànzì Analyzer 1.9

Sorry—there's no installation program. To get up and running, simply download this ZIP file and run the executable.

Feedback

Feel free to send feedback to "feedback @ hemiola.com". Wondering what a hemiola is? Click here for a definition.