On Sat, 30 Jul 2005 15:37:32 -0400, Andrew Dunbar <hippietrail@...>
wrote:

> For me looking up characters in a Chinese or Japanese dictionary is very
> painstaking

[...]
When I was on "middle-class welfare", the unemployment "high" around 1992,
I spent some time betwenn fruitless job searching trying (asa hobbyist) to
translate Japanese, using the then-current Nelson Dictionary; did that
without any formal training. It was pre-global-warming-glacially slow,
about half an hour, average, maybe, per sentence. I was impressed by the
ambiguities; one needed to deduce context from the rest of the sentence,
it seemed to me.

Made myself a narrow scroll to put Nelson's rules all in one document...

> Or maybe I take stroke order into account when trying to count the
> strokes.

Ouch. Learning exactly what amounts to one stroke is crucial!

Once one has used the correct radical, and counted strokes correctly, what
determines the sequence of hanzi/kanji within the little group?

--
Nicholas Bodley /*|*\ Waltham, Mass. (Not "MA")
hanja, too (What's VN for them? Han Nom?)