Stroke order animation for traditional characters

[david808]

To make Arch Chinese complete, we are planning to add stroke order animation and worksheet generation for about 4000 commonly-used traditional characters. Before we kick off this effort, we would like to know if it is worthwhile. Let us know your thoughts.

Thanks.

[skylee]

Which standard will your website use? I've seen different stroke orders listed in different dictionaries. I'm concerned as I use stroke order input method on my handset and AFAIK it follows the Taiwan standard.

I think this website (of the Ministry of Education of Taiwan) for animated stroke order of 4808 traditional characters is very good -> http://stroke-order.learningweb.moe.edu.tw/about_program.jsp

This is probably the dictionary which forms the basis of the above website -> http://www.edu.tw/files/site_content/M0001/bishuen/c8.htm?open

[Hofmann]

Even if you follow the Traditional stroke order for the Traditional-only characters, what about the characters that are both Simplified and Traditional? I see that Arch Chinese ends 或 with the dot, unlike the Traditional standard. It would get messy if, for example, you ended 或 with the dot but 國 with 丿一.

Starting 花 with 一丨丨 but starting 華 with 丨一一丨 is similarly messy.

Edited November 11, 2008 at 02:46 AM by Hofmann

[david808]

Hofmann, you brought up a very good point. In fact, that is exactly one of the reasons we started with simplified characters only. One way to address this is to allow the users to toggle system mode: traditional or simplified. There are character overlaps between the two, but each mode has its own stroke information for each character.

[Hofmann]

That seems like a lot of work, but it would be great if you can do that. Perhaps if you ask the authors of this site, they might give you some data.

[skylee]

There is already a good website on what the OP proposed (the site in #5 is the same as the site in my #2). I wonder why it is necessary (from the users' POV) or worthwhile (from the OP's POV) to have another website of the same information (assuming it will be more or less the same).

[roddy]

I would query the need for 4,000 of them. Surely once you've covered the general top-to-bottom left-to-right rules and have encountered all the components, you rarely if ever actually need to be told the actual order. I can see it might be nice for the sake of completeness, and that learners might find it attractive, but I'm not convinced it's actually necessary, or that they'll actually get used that much.

[Hofmann]

The interface of Arch Chinese is in English.

[david808]

Hofmann, again, you hit the nail. The target audience of Arch Chinese is foreign learners. Also, another important factor is the usability. We strive to make the page loading fast, make the animation smooth, and without reloading or loading another page, one click (or maybe more in some cases) to get the info you need, at the cost of page views.

Roddy: I sort of agree with you. It might not be necessary to create the 4,000 traditional characters. We are planning to add 2,300 frequently-used traditional characters, to be exact.

skylee: yes. Thanks for the links. We had requests for traditional character support, but we are not sure how big the user base is. That's why we posted here.

As a side product, once we have created the stroke animations, we can generate the stroke sequences in writing worksheets for those characters

Thanks,