Animated chinese characters.

December 12, 2002 9:38 AM

Animated chinese characters. Using the web and a bit of javascript this site draws Chinese ideographs. The site might be useful to some people but I'm just fascinated by watching the characters being drawn and by the idea of usring the web to teach people to use the ancient technology of writing.
posted by rdr (10 comments total)

How would you say: "I surrender. I was waiting for you lads to take over. Thank Marx you are here and running things"?
posted by Postroad at 9:50 AM on December 12, 2002

the ocrat site parallels the usefulness of zhongwen.com

very nice, thank you!

my only gripe is that it's all in GB and using simplified forms, but still....
posted by dorian at 10:10 AM on December 12, 2002

Indeed, this is an excellent site. One of my problems in writing Chinese is remembering correct stroke order. It is fantastic to have a resource like this that actually shows the proper order. I will master the Chinese language yet! Thanks, rdr, for a great link.
posted by Joey Michaels at 10:13 AM on December 12, 2002

Good for Japanese too, as Japanese kanji are the same Chinese characters. The meanings of the characters are different though...
posted by SweetJesus at 10:29 AM on December 12, 2002

It's interesting that rdr chose to include that "history of writing" link, as it ignores completely any history of written language that took place outside of the Mediterranean basin. It's more properly a "history of alphabetic writing"--there's no attempt to address the evolution of modern ideographic systems.
posted by mr_roboto at 10:30 AM on December 12, 2002

I thought cuneiforms were the earliest known writing systems. I was attempting to point out the age of writing tech. Rereading the web page it does appear to concentrate on writing systems in Europe and North Africa. Anyone got any better links to suggest?
posted by rdr at 10:45 AM on December 12, 2002

Not having it work with Unicode is mad.
posted by Pretty_Generic at 11:39 AM on December 12, 2002

Thanks for the link rdr!
posted by hama7 at 3:30 PM on December 12, 2002

Not having it work with Unicode is mad.

last time (and that was a while ago) I looked at unicode fonts, they were sorta ugly in terms of chinese characters & kanji.

also, GB and Big5 are pretty entrenched in localized OSs and software (especially IMEs), not to mention websites. I imagine that there must be some prettier unicode fonts these days, and I do agree that it's the right(er, -est) way to go for now, but ....sort of an equivalent task to getting ppl to start using xhtml (or just getting them to stop using bad html, heh...) -- most of us know it's right and yet the badness somehow proliferates.
posted by dorian at 3:50 PM on December 12, 2002

Interesting site. There is one potential problem: while the strokes are shown in the proper order, there is no indication of the direction in which the stroke is to be drawn. Yes, this is usually obvious with a little experience, but a site like this this is intended for the inexperienced.
posted by Slithy_Tove at 10:24 PM on December 12, 2002