What's A Website That Recognizes Chinese Characters?

[Pianote]

I would like to take a picture of a Chinese character and get the meaning of it. 

Can anyone recommend any websites or apps?

 

Thanks again!

[Lu]

I'm pretty sure the app Pleco does this. If you are learning Chinese, you should definitely get this app anyway, it's enormously useful. It contains several dictionaries (C-E, E-C, C-C and more), gives pronunciation, related words, flashcards... And a lot of it is free.

[Dawei3]

The googletranslate app will do this too, albeit the function was disabled in China when I last visited.  It works elsewhere in the world.  

 

Googletranslate will translate an entire page of text from a picture.  It also gives you the pinyin for each character.  

[mungouk]

2 hours ago, Lu said:

I'm pretty sure the app Pleco does this.

 

It's a paid add-on for Pleco, but the free demo is pretty usable on its own. 

 

It's worth having.

 

[Shelley]

Pleco, with out a doubt, its worth paying for it and you get the bonus of a dictionary platform, flashcards, reader and more.

 

In my opinion no student of Chinese should be with out it. Top of the list for "what apps do I need to help me study Chinese" 

[Pianote]

So, I Just downloaded Pleco and it's sooo helpful. This is gonna be so much fun!

[imron]

Just be careful translating things like 干爆鸭子

[Pianote]

I cant find the characters I'm looking for on Pleco.  There are only 17 rows of characters. What should I do?

[Shelley]

I am not sure I understand your question.

Can you explain what you have done so far?

When you downloaded it what did you do?

Have you got any dictionaries? 

Any chance of screen shot?

 

[889]

We can only guess what you're doing or what you're trying to read.

 

Pleco doesn't work too well with large blocks of type. It works best with one-  or two-character words.

 

You need to change the size of the input box appropriately and move your phone a bit so that only the one or two characters you're looking for are in the box. Hold steady and the character reader should turn blue when it's got a lock on the reading.

 

Actually, I think finding characters by writing them out on Pleco is much easier than fiddling with the text and your phone camera, if you've got stroke order down.

 

 

[mikelove]

@pianote - are you looking at the radical input box? For looking up characters with a camera you'd want to download the demo of our OCR add-on (in the "Add-ons" screen); that demo gives you pinyin but no English, but you can find the pinyin using it and then go into the search screen and type in the pinyin to get your definition.

 

Since it sounds like you're on iOS, for handwriting input see this section of our tutorial.

[Dawei3]

Googletranslate is remarkably good with blocks of text, even in difficult situations.  There was a granite plaque at a 成都 historic site that had letters carved into it.  I took a picture of it and google was actually able to recognize the characters and translate the entire text.  (And if I'm remembering correctly, OCR worked when I was using cellular data, but not when on wi-fi).

 

I've also used it to translate Chinese subtitles from movies.  It will do so dynamically - by holding the phone in front of the text to be translated - but it works best by taking a picture of the text and then translating it.