I do hope you all can view these Google Plus links since I do not know a better way to post screen shots.

Perhaps my advertising in Google Plus and Facebook will bring some new users!

https://plus.google.com/118445055305659925372/posts?hl=en


I am experimenting with how to use

http://www.chinese-tools.com/tools/mouse.html

to help me gain skill in drawing Chinese characters.

I tried many times to draw mu4 - tree, wood and it was hit or miss but mostly miss - ALTHOUGH THE FRAGILE NATURE OF chinese-tools-mouse is good exercise for me, like playing a slot machine, trying harder and harder to get the character to appear.

When I searched for an animation of the stroke order and used that I had better luck. I think this program senses stroke order and not merely the final image, shape, because when I follow stroke order then mu4 comes up more frequently.

http://www.ncrcls.org/csl/csl101/chars%28units6-13%29/units%28jin-tu%29/html-mu4-tree.htm

I depend upon http://skritter.com to exercise me initially but then I use Microsoft Pinyin Input in Word 2007 to record the pinyin and the character and then I use Chinese-Tools-Mouse-Input to reinforce my skills in a different way.

Chinese-Tools-Mouse is also helpful because it offers 6 or 8 choices and I can study those for character recognition and to learn new characters.

You might want to look at Pinyin Joe's http://www.pinyinjoe.com/ for lot of info on Chinese input on an English system.

If you haven't tried it yet, if you click on a word or character in Skritter, Skritter will popup a page with a bunch of information about the character/word. From there you can go to any of several dictionaries which in some cases have more than just a definition. Like stroke order. I like YellowBridge and MDBG.

Thanks, Dennis, your suggestion helps a lot. Pinyin Joe wrote to me and suggested I reinstall Windows on my old XP but I explained I dont HAVE install disks, and I am getting by for now with the slight mouse bug caused by Microsoft Pinyin. Pinyin Joe also explained that the older the machine, the buggier Google Pinyin is... but MS PY does the job for now.

I wonder how many people work with Chinese on Ubuntu. It is easier for me to get a free Ubuntu install than to purchase Windows, especially on old machines.

William,

Are you using Windows IME which supports both pinyin and single character input for both Windows XP and 7. It's there on Windows 7, but you have to set it up. For Windows XP you may have to install it, but Pinyin Joe explains that for both Windows versions.

As far as re-installing Windows XP, you may already have a backup copy of Windows XP hidden on your harddrive. It can be used to reset your machine to the way it was installed at the factory. This was the case with Dell machines. but my Dell XP machine has died and I don't remember how to do that.

What system are you working with now?

If you're not familiar with Ubuntu, I would stay with Windows for awhile longer.