- Arch Chinese Features

Arch Chinese uses a Community Driven Professional Development model. All the features come from Chinese language learners and Chinese teaching professionals. We have received a variety of feature requests, but due to limited resources, we can only address them one at a time. Currently, key features include

• Animate stroke order for ALL the Chinese characters defined in the national standard character set of mainland China and 7,000 frequently-used characters in the traditional Chinese character set, which is used in Taiwan and Hong Kong
• Generate character writing worksheets with stroke sequences, radicals, English definitions and Pinyin in PDF format for offline handwriting practice. With one mouse click, you can generate beautiful worksheets for more than 100 characters at a time instantly. The worksheets are highly customizable. You can provide your own definitions in French, Spanish, German, or whatever language you prefer. It is great for Chinese language teachers and parents to create Mandarin teaching and learning materials.
• Create and print hardcopy Chinese character flashcards from Worksheets page or Chinese vocabulary flashcards from Flashcards page on perforated business card paper for offline study. Alternatively, you can use Printable Chinese Flashcard Maker to create customized paper flashcards. They are perfect for teachers and parents to create learning materials for young learners.
• One of the most fast, powerful and complete Chinese character, word and idiom dictionaries. Our uniquely-designed Chinese-English and English-Chinese two-way dictionary provides a variety of ways to look up Chinese characters, words and idioms. You can search by fuzzy Pinyin (Pinyin without tones), Pinyin with tone numbers, Chinese Pinyin Table, Chinese character radicals, Chinese character components, English words, English phrases, English sentences, English sentence fragments, Chinese characters, Chinese phrases or Chinese sentence fragments. Furthermore, you can mix English, Chinese character or phrase and Pinyin in your search queries. For the part you are not sure, you can even simply use a wildcard in your search query. Search results are ordered by usage frequency and complexity.

• Grab common words and phrases from the Chinese English dictionary to generate word worksheets or nicely formatted paper flashcards for offline study.
• The innovative Chinese Word Detail View allows the users to view not just the breakdown of the word and the example sentences, but also same head character words, same tail character words and the words with similar pronunciations. The similar pronunciation words include the words with same syllables but different tones, such as xiao3 xue2(小学, elementary school), xiao3 xue3(小雪, light snow). Further, depending on how many similar pronunciation words available, the system intelligently identify a list of words to help users to differentiate confusing pronunciations (such as zh- vs. z-, ch- vs. c-, sh- vs. s-, -ong vs. -on, -eng vs. en and -ing vs. in). The last is the unique Words of Interest, which lists similiar meaning or related words available in the system.
• Mandarin Chinese Tone Drill tool to practice and test your knowledge of Mandarin Chinese Pinyin and tones
• Chinese character decomposition explorer allows you to drill down into the character components one layer at a time. It helps you understand what components a character is made up from and how characters are related to each other
• With the innovative Chinese Word Worksheet Generator, you can quickly make customized Mandarin Chinese words or sentence worksheets for your classes or children.

• Export character stroke sequences to JPEG or PNG images.
• Similar to the YouTube videos, the Character Animation Creator allows you to create embeddable and interactive character animations quickly. You can integrate the animations into your school or personal web pages.
• Display common example phrases and sentences using the character and their English translations
• A simple and easy-to-use Chinese flashcard program to help you learn Chinese characters and words efficiently and effectively. You can use the pre-defined flashcards or create your own. With one click, you can generate word worksheets and neat paper flashcards.
• Provide Standard Mandarin Chinese Pinyin Table, the complete listing of all Pinyin syllables used in standard Mandarin, including possible tone variations and their pronunciations. Users can view all the Chinese characters (along with English definitions) that have identical pronunciation but different meanings.
• Feature Chinese Radical Table to help users look up a character easily. The table lists all the radicals for the simplified Chinese characters with English tool tips. You can click a radical to view the characters with the radical. For some common radicals, such as 扌 and 木, there may be hundreds of characters with the radical. The system allows you to perform two-level sorting, first level by stroke count, usage frequency or Pinyin (alphabetically), and second level by stroke count.
• Convert pinyin with tone number notation to pinyin with tone marks
• Animate a character stroke by stroke, one character at a time or continuously animates all the characters you have imported or studied.
• Run on all major platforms (Windows, Mac OS X and Linux) and Android-based tablets.
• Display radicals, components, measure words, character usage frequencies, character structure information, English translations, stroke counts, Pinyin and the corresponding traditional characters (if any)
• Native-speaker pronunciations for characters, words and Pinyin syllables (including all the initials and finals).
• Fast and easy-to-use user interface
• Keep track of characters you have studied
• and more...

More exciting features are under active development. We also welcome you to provide feedback, request new features or report bugs. Our support email is support@ArchChinese.com.