question for Chinese learners

[adam19]

Hi all,

I am trying to put a website for learning Chinese, But I am not sure whether should I use Chinese character encoding or all Chinese characters as image.

I don't want to put all Chinese characters in my page as images, but if majority of Chinese learners can not read , I think I have to go the second option.

Thanks for any comments!

Adam

[imron]

Use Unicode. More specifically, UTF-8. This will allow you to use text from any language on your page at the same time.

[renzhe]

UTF-8 will still not work if the people accessing the site don't have Chinese fonts installed.

But any Chinese learner who wants to access a Chinese learning website will have to install Chinese fonts sooner or later, anything else would be totally pointless.

If it's a site for Chinese learners, then unicode (UTF-8 ) is the way to go. Preferably with a small FAQ section for people who don't see the characters, pointing them to a free Chinese font they can download or something.

[here2learn]

Agreed. For people who don't have chinese fonts, images are great, but if they're even beginners they'll have fonts (or will need them asap).

For anyone learning chinese, IMAGES of characters ARE ANNOYING. We often use mouseover tools to "help us read", and the mouse can't see what character is in an image. Get it?

OR we might want to cut & paste the text into a translator, or a dictionary.

It's nearly impossible to look up a word online if it's an image. I'd have to go get my big old hardcover dictionary and look it up manually.

As a learner, I'd be annoyed very quickly if I was trying to learn from a site that used images for any amount of text. I would not use that site.

(I am not talking about the occasional header or decoration, a few images for aesthetics are reasonable)

[renzhe]

It's nearly impossible to look up a word online if it's an image. I'd have to go get my big old hardcover dictionary and look it up manually.

Sorry for the offtopic, but you can also do it online, you just need a dictionary which indexes characters based on radicals.

Xiaoma Cidian does this. Find the radical, sort the character list by number of strokes, and you can find it quite quickly.

This is one of the reasons I like that dictionary over other, more popular ones.

[here2learn]

Cool, thanks renzhe!

(still can't simply mouseover it though, you know, for ultra lazy reading)

[Lu]

Agreed with the above answers, if your site is aimed at people who really want to learn Chinese, use text. They'll need Chinese fonts sooner or later anyway, and then they'll be annoyed by images.