iChinese is a tool to learn writing Chinese characters and a Chinese-English dictionary with handwriting recognition. I have been trying this iPhone app for the past few days, and I really like it. It should be available on Installer, or you can add its own source: http://ichinese.de/repo

Once installed, go to the Library and install the first 4 free lessons and the demo dictionary. The demo contains all the characters in the 4 free lessons, and it allows you to try the handwriting recognition.

Since my Chinese is very poor, sometimes I need to know what a certain character mean, but unless I have it in my computer (where I can look it up digitally), I would have to look it up in a Chinese-English print dictionary. Even then, sometimes it’s hard for me to know which radical to look for, and in the end I just can’t find it or give up.

With this app I can simply copy the character and write it with my finger on my iPhone. Using a finger is not as easy as using a stylus, but I never had any problem with it. It might not look pretty, but it is recognized.

Once the character is found and selected in the bottom bar, a list of results is shown, divided by the number of characters. Chinese words are often a combination of 2+ characters, so these combinations are included in the results.

Finally, you can get the traditional and simplified version of the characters, as well as the various meanings and their pinyin. Pretty much everything you would need to know.

It is also possible to enter the pinyin to get the corresponding characters, or even enter English words. This last option isn’t a true English-Chinese dictionary, but it’s useful most of the time.

The more complex the character is, the more time it will take to find it. I found that at most you’ll wait 5-10 seconds. For simpler characters the results are instantaneous.

I have the full dictionary (20,000+ characters), but there were a few instances in which it couldn’t recognize the character I entered. It could be the stroke order was wrong, or it might be a bug. In one instance I did find the character with pinyin, so it is in the dictionary, but it just couldn’t recognize the handwriting.

The lessons are less useful to me, since I am not a novice user. But from the little I tried, the main focus is the stroke order and position, as well as memorizing the characters. You’ll have to write those characters over and over, in order to commit them to memory, which I think will be useful to many learners. You can also customize lesson settings to better suit your level.

Here are some improvements I’d like to see in the future:

- Improve character recognition speed
- Allow bottom search bar in dictionary to be scrollable, to look for similar characters.
- Improve recognition (some characters are not recognized).
- Remember past searches. Sometimes it’s useful to remember the last few searches.

Overall this is well worth the 4.99 Euro I paid for the full Chinese-English dictionary. I think the interface is very well done, sometimes I just enter characters for fun, which might help with my Chinese. If you’re interested in Chinese, give this a try and let me know what you think.