Skip to main content

##Drawing characters by hand

TL;DR: We can obtain plaintext by manually drawing characters one-by-one using various software.

###Drawing on your phone

If your phone has Chinese input installed, you likely can already do this. E.g., here I'm entering in my name into Pleco:

MDBG Online Dictionary

MDBG will accept hand drawn characters, but it does care about stroke order. Click on the "brush" icon next to the search box:

mdbg.net stroke input

###Random websites

If you Google draw characters chinese there's lots of software in which you can draw characters by hand. It'll change over time, and there's sometimes browser issues, etc. So one random example is qhanzi.com:

###Google Translate

I believe it's possible to do something similar with Google Translate by clicking this icon:

But I can't get it to work properly, likely because it uses some Google feature that's blocked in China.

Becky 李蓓
  • 17.1k
  • 13
  • 53
  • 170