I have been learning Mandarin off-and-on for the past two years or so, and I’m tired of using NJStar and clunky Pinyin phonetic input — that, and I have a hard time remembering characters. I hear tell that you can use a graphics tablet to input characters, and I’m curious as to how that works, what I need to download, and how much would it cost to set my (Windows XP) PC up with that sort of thing. Anyone have any experience with this input method?
It’s not clear from the post whether you have the hardware yet, but a quick search on dealextreme yields this
http://www.dealextreme.com/details.dx/sku.620
So from the sounds of it, you can get it all for about 8 frogskins, shipped.
It’s a fairly common feature in China - three years ago my father got a Motorola cellphone where the entire area of the keypad was touch sensitive (like a laptop touchpad) and one could use the index finger to write characters.
I can’t say it works terribly well. One of the things about writing Chinese is that if you can’t SEE each one of your strokes on the writing surface, it’s kind of weird, and the writing will come out as a collection of jumbled strokes. AFAIK it’s not terribly popular.
Wenlin is an English<->Chinese dicstionary that has a handwriring input feature. You can use the mouse or a graphics tablet. I have found it to be the most useful dictionary for learning.
PlecoDict is a similar tool that will run on a handheld (Palm or Windows Mobile) which also supports handwriting input.