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What are Kanji?

According to Japan-Guide.com:

Kanji are Chinese characters. They were first imported to Japan in the 5th century via Korea.

Kanji are ideograms, i.e. every character has a meaning and corresponds to a word. In combining characters, more words can be created (e.g. "electricity" in combination with "car" means "train"). There are about 50,000 characters of which 2,000 to 3,000 are needed for the understanding of newspapers. The government declared a set of 1,945 characters as the "kanji for everyday use".

Kanji is pronounced "Hanzi" or "Hanzai" in China.

List of Kanji

This PDF file contains a list of all the Mah Jong kanji, Unicode values, and Pinyin which you will need to enter these kanji using the Chinese (Taiwan) IME.

PDF
Mah Jong Kanji
 PDF, 192 KB

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How do I enter Kanji on my PC?

In order to display or enter kanji characters on your Windows PC (I cannot speak for Mac or Linux users here) you have three options:

1. TTF font

Use a specialist kanji font such as Jim's Kanji (or Sword Kanji, which is the same font collection compiled as a Unicode font) or the Mah Jong Kanji fonts below.

This method has one major disadvantage: Chinese, Japanese and Korean employ a great number of kanji; far more than one TTF can accommodate, though perhaps not a Unicode TTF font!

2. Input Method Editor (IME)

Install a Global Input Method Editor (Global IME). The IMEs I have installed are Chinese (PRC) and Chinese (Taiwan).

Windows 95, 98, NT
The

Microsoft Global IME (Input Method Editor) 5.02 for Windows 95, 98, and NT 4.0 enables the typing of Japanese, Chinese and Korean into supporting applications. In the "Text services and input languages" section click the Details... button.

Windows XP
In Windows XP open Control Panel and double-click the Regional and Language Options icon (If your Control Panel is set to Category view then first click "Date, Time, Language, and Regional Options" and then click "Add other languages". Click the Languages tab, and in the "Supplemental language support" section click "Install files for East Asian languages"; you need your Windows XP CD-ROM for this, and it will reboot afterwards.
You now need to add an input method. Do the same again to get to the Languages tab. In the "Text Services and input languages" section click the button marked "Details...". In the "Installed services" section click the Add... button and select "Chinese (Taiwan)". When it has installed click on "Microsoft New Phonetic IME 2002a" under the Chinese (Taiwan) Keyboard, and click Properties... Click the Keyboard Mapping tab and select "HanYu Pinyin", now OK your way out.

3. Enter Unicode Hex value

In Microsoft Word (or it's distant cousin, the already-installed Microsoft WordPad) you may enter a Unicode hex value (e.g. 9EBB) and then convert it to its unicode character by holding down the Alt key and striking 'X'. (Shift+Alt+X will covert it back into its Unicode hex value.)

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Unicode Tools

There were a number of useful unicode-enabled applications that I used in this project.

SC UniPad

www.unipad.org

SC UniPad

SC UniPad is a Unicode™ plain text editor for the Windows NT®, Windows 2000®, Windows 9x®, Windows ME® and Windows XP® operating systems.

UniPad has the following features:

  • Displays about 53,000 Unicode characters instantly without installing extra fonts
  • On-screen soft keyboard
  • Over 60 built-in keyboard layouts
  • Character map for easy selection of any Unicode character
  • Import / export of over 60 codepages, encodings
  • Unicode formats UTF-8, UTF-16, UTF-32, UTF-7, Compression Scheme, \u
  • supports Unicode standard 4.01

I found this to be a very useful tool; it's like a Unicode version of Notepad. You can copy kanji characters from websites, then paste them into UniPad and find out its Unicode value (U+xxxx).

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OpenOffice.org

www.openoffice.org

OpenOffice.org

OpenOffice.org is a freeware, open-source office suite which is compatible with Microsoft files. It contains:

  • Writer: a very good unicode-enabled word-processor
  • Calc: a rather good spreadsheet
  • Impress: a multimedia presentation application
  • Draw: for creating diagrams and illustrations

I much prefer Writer to MS Word (any day!) and used the OpenOfficer word-processor to create all the kanji documents that kept me right throughout the project.

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Chinese Language Sites

Zhongwen

www.zhongwen.com

Zhongwen.com contains the complete text of Amazon's best selling, best reviewed Chinese-English dictionary. This is a very good resource.

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English Chinese Dictionary - Babylon

www.babylon.com/define/99/English-Chinese-Dictionary.html

Chinese to English and English to Chinese dictionaries featuring Traditional and Simplified Chinese as well as Pinyin forms for people who can speak Chinese but do not know the Chinese writing system.

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Chinese Character Dictionary

www.mandarintools.com/chardict.html

A very good resource for looking up English, Pinyin or Cantonese words with good options.

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OK88 English-Chinese Dictionary

www.okdaily.com/cgi-bin/ecdict.cgi?english=mahjong

Look up English words and how they translate into kanji.

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CJK Language Packs on Windows PCs

http://zsigri.tripod.com/fontboard/cjk/cjksupp.html

A good resource on how to view Chinese, Japanese and Korean (CJK) languages on your Windows PC.

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