Categorizing handwritten Chinese characters

The focus of this thesis is on the categorization of handwritten Chinese characters. The main question is, ‘How can handwritten Chinese characters be categorized in order to make unknown characters findable?’. Handwritten Chinese characters differ from regular or printed Chinese characters. Learning to read handwritten Chinese is not part of any university curriculum and it is usually not taught in language schools. There are only a few sources that can be used to find the corresponding regular form of an unknown handwritten character. Four sources are reviewed in order to explore and judge various methods. This research is based on the methods used in A Manual of Chinese Running-Hand Writing: Especially as it is Used in Japan written by Groeneveldt and De Saint Aulaire (1861), Dictionnaire des formes cursives des caractères chinois (1909) by Stanislas Millot, Sōsho Daijiten (1936) by Sukeyuki Endō and Chinese cursive script: An introduction to handwriting in Chinese (1958) by Fang...Show moreThe focus of this thesis is on the categorization of handwritten Chinese characters. The main question is, ‘How can handwritten Chinese characters be categorized in order to make unknown characters findable?’. Handwritten Chinese characters differ from regular or printed Chinese characters. Learning to read handwritten Chinese is not part of any university curriculum and it is usually not taught in language schools. There are only a few sources that can be used to find the corresponding regular form of an unknown handwritten character. Four sources are reviewed in order to explore and judge various methods. This research is based on the methods used in A Manual of Chinese Running-Hand Writing: Especially as it is Used in Japan written by Groeneveldt and De Saint Aulaire (1861), Dictionnaire des formes cursives des caractères chinois (1909) by Stanislas Millot, Sōsho Daijiten (1936) by Sukeyuki Endō and Chinese cursive script: An introduction to handwriting in Chinese (1958) by Fang-yü Wang. The product of this research will be a set of guidelines of what a user-friendly dictionary would look like.Show less

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Categorizing handwritten Chinese characters