Hanzi Lookup - Chinese character lookup + English meaning app for iPhone and iPad
Developer: Omar Rabbolini
First release : 08 Feb 2010
App size: 1.16 Mb
Let Hanzi Lookup help you learn the pronunciation of Chinese characters.
Enter the Chinese characters (either Simplified or Traditional) you want to learn the pronunciation of and let Hanzi Lookup do the rest.
You will quickly learn both Mandarin (Pinyin) and Cantonese (LSHK Jyutping) pronunciations thanks to the flashcard-like user interface. Curious about the meaning of a character in English? Use the Dictionary mode button (中文-中文 / 中文-Eng) and switch to English mode. Its that simple!
Quickly improve your Chinese with Hanzi Lookup!
NOTE: You dont need an internet connection to use this app. All dictionaries are stored locally. So you can use this on the plane, on holiday, etc.!!!
Latest reviews of Hanzi Lookup - Chinese character lookup + English meaning app for iPhone and iPad
Deserves zero stars or minus stars but I had to put one to file this review. Awful. Only 3 brief lines of directions in poor English. The search box offers no way to enter strokes for chinese characters so the program is unusable for the purpose stated: to search, define and translate unknown characters or series of characters. Most web texts with characters are image files so it is not possible to copy them into the search box. Shame on the developer and on Apple for approving this broken APP.
I have to partially agree with the reviewer who says there isnt a good way to enter the text. The only real way to do it that works for someone trying to learn characters is copying from other apps (like google or safari, etc.) and pasting... a tedious process. Using the Apple stroke entry "keyboard" isnt useful because you have to know the stroke order for the character to get it right. If you "stroke" the lines of a character in the wrong order you wont get the character you want. For example, just trying to enter the character for middle, zhong1 (中), should be easy. Its not a difficult character but I cant get apples stroke entry to recognize what I draw. The thing I draw looks just like the character but because I dont know the stroke order to create the character, it wont recognize it. Imagine trying to write the letter E... you stroke the left vertical line first and then the three horizontal lines from the top down. Thats the "correct" way to write the letter E. If you dont know that and you stroke the bottom horizontal line first and then the top two and then finish with the vertical line on the left, no stroke entry keyboard will recognize it. A person learning chinese (like myself) will not be able to enter characters they want to look up. The app cant work because of this. Its not entirely the apps fault (which is why I gave it 2 stars rather than zero or one) since its the stroke entry keyboard that is the limiting part but its doomed from the start.
Its obvious this program took 99 cents worth of ingenuity and labor to make. Utterly useless program with essentially no directions. Apple - horrible quality control here. DONT BUY!