Reading Chinese Characters

[Nicholas Weeks]

I am too old & stupid to make much use of this site, but I do enjoy clicking on a character to see the meaning & hear (in many cases) the pronunciation. There are also some major sutras translated with the clickable Chinese right next to the English.

http://chinesenotes.com/buddhism_toc.html

[cdpatton]

I am too old & stupid to make much use of this site, but I do enjoy clicking on a character to see the meaning & hear (in many cases) the pronunciation. There are also some major sutras translated with the clickable Chinese right next to the English.

http://chinesenotes.com/buddhism_toc.html

Very nice. I've been working on a less ambitious bi-lingual presentation of translations - mainly just using the mouse-over trick to pop up tool tips for Sanskrit terms and also to note variations from the Taisho I use in my sourcetext. I have dreamed of building some sort of vocabulary system like the one on the above website, but its time consuming. I've looked at wikis as a way of doing it - looks like they are using some sort of php database on this site.

Way-back-when (hmm, mid-late 90s?), I had gotten swept up in the theory of hypertext, that it would be a textual revolution, adding all kinds of new dimensions to how documents are presented and read, which most people just never caught onto or didn't have time to implement. They just used links to connects documents together in traditional ways (chapter 1, chapter 2, chapter 3, oh, a footnote . . .) or connect their site to someone else's. But it was "meant" to do much more than that. This is a good example of what it can do - add multiple layers of information at once, instead of the one-dimensional physical page that, at best, can have footnotes at the bottom - or endnotes at the back, etc.

Thanks for the link - more ideas to throw into the mix.

Charlie.

[Nicholas Weeks]

A preview of a new version of this site: http://chinesenotes.com/buddhistdict/index.html