Bihua.com - Part 1 - The Introduction (Search Word based on Pin Yin)

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Bihua 笔画 means strokes. Each Chinese character is formed from one or more than one strokes. The stroke here refers to each movement of your pencil to form a Chinese character.

For example:

三 (san) consists of 3 strokes, to be exact 3 same stroke of horizontal line “一” that we know as 横 (heng) which are all different in length. 

十 (shi) consists of 2 strokes, 2 different strokes. The first is “一” that we know as 横 (heng) and the second is the vertical line“丨”, known as 竖 (shu) .

There is an order to follow when we write Chinese character and this is what we called 笔顺 (bishun). Thus, for 十 (shi), we CANNOT start with “丨”. We have to start with the horizontal stroke “一”, then followed by “丨”

This is the correct bishun (order of strokes) for 十 (shi) which means 10 (Ten)

There will be a post dedicated to bihua/bishun later on. As of now, Let's focus on the bihua.com The webpages look messy because there are many external links and ads on it. This is one of the way that they do to make sure that they can maintain good website for people like you and me. So, don't complain! Do not lose yourself in the sea of Chinese Characters that might seem alien to you. I will show you what to focus on and what to ignore.

This site will help you with your writing and structure of characters in Chinese. It also works as dictionary (Chinese to Chinese and Chinese to English).

First when you open the site, their homepage looks roughly like this:

Please focus on the circled part in the middle. That is where we are going to input our Chinese character. Underneath it, there are 3 blue hyperlinks in the square brackets:

1. 拼音查字    pin yin cha zi              Looking for characters based on pinyin

2. 部首查字    bu shou cha zi            Looking for characters based on the radical

3. 笔画数查字    bi hua shu cha zi     Looking for characters based on the numbers of strokes

Let's look at the first one: 拼音查字    pin yin cha zi     

When you click on it, it will take you to the following page

Just for example, you can click on "bai". This will show you ALL Chinese characters that are pronounced as "bai" in any tone.

I am gonna explore more on the circled character of 白 bai

As you can see there are 3 blue links beside each of the Chinese characters that say:

字典     zi dian     dictionary

笔画     bi hua      strokes

组词      zu ci       word formation

Let's click on the first one: 字典     zi dian     dictionary

This is what you are going to see.. It consists of a few parts. I will break it down for you further, so easy to understand.

The first to look at is the header part (the one on top!)

As you might have guessed, the black squared part is the pinyin. You can click on the speaker to listen to the recorded audio on how to pronounce it correctly.

The 3 red squares are (from the left)

1. Left: 简体部首 jian ti bu shou  

This is to show you the radical. Please read about the simple explanation about  radical on the previous post. Please click here

2. Middle: 部外笔画 bu wai bi hua  

This is to show you, after excluding the strokes for the radical, how many strokes are there. However, because 白 is radical itself and it doesn't contain any other parts, so it shows you 0 (zero)

3. Right: 总笔画 zong bu shou

This is to show you total strokes for the character 白

Moving on is the second part in the middle, this is the Chinese to Chinese translation for 白. Do you see the red part underneath, that is called 注音符号 (zhu yin fu hao) ths is the national phonetic alphabet (used before the current Chinese phonetic alphabets that we know as pinyin). From my knowledge, Taiwan is still using this.

For your information, here is how the old version phonetics represent the current hanyu pinyin

Last part of the dictionary page for 白 (bai) that might come useful for you is this:

The red squared parts above show us the translation for 白 in English.

The blue squared part is the words that are related to 白, it includes the antonym and synonyms.

Other than dictionary, this site also will show you the bihua or strokes for the character. If you still have this page open, click on the second one that say: 笔画

This link will take you the following page:

The part on top, the 6 boxes, are showing you the order of the strokes when you write 白. Underneath it, you should know what the first 2 rows refer to, the character and the pinyin. 3rd row is the radical, as shown in the dictionary page too. The 4th row shows you the total number of strokes, which is 5 (five). The 5th row shows you the order of the strokes. The 6th row is to show you the name of each strokes in row 5, respectively. There is even an animation on how to write the characters as you can see on the right side, the black character.

Last part you can either go back to the initial page here, or you can continue from the page above.

组词 (zu ci) means word formation. It will show you all the possible words formation that come from one character of "白"

You can click on either one of them and see the long explanation of the phrase. It is super detailed explanation. This will not come useful for beginner as of now. I try to click one, on the second row, 白水。It shows me this page:

The first paragraph shows you the explanation in simplified Chinese and the second paragraph in Traditional Chinese.

So, basically those are the things that yo have to pay attention to. The Chinese to Chinese translation is very useful for people who are already know Chinese and would like to explore more in depth. It works just like English to English dictionary.

End of this week, I will continue to part 2, where you can use bihua website to look for characters based on their radical

As of now, you explore more on the first item, search based on pinyin.

Happy Exploring,

Linda Tan

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