Chinese Shape-Sequence Dictionary: Find Chinese Characters by Letter Shapes (Hanzishu Learning Chinese Series - Chinese Character Shape-Sequence Scheme)

The "Chinese Shape-Sequence Dictionary" finds Chinese characters by letter shapes.
Currently, the most popular method for sorting Chinese characters is by Pinyin (the Romanized phonetic transcription system). Therefore, most of the Chinese character dictionaries published in recent decades are organized based on Pinyin. However, this approach creates a significant problem. For most people, especially students, the most important use of a dictionary is to look up unfamiliar characters—those they cannot recognize or pronounce. The secondary use is for checking the detailed meanings or usages of characters they already know. If the dictionary is sorted by Pinyin, users cannot directly search for characters they cannot pronounce, therefore a deadlock is formed. Unfortunately for students, most of the characters fall into this category. The auxiliary radical-based search method is often quite complex, random, and not systematic. As a result, using a Chinese character dictionary remains a challenge for students, especially non-native speaker students. Consequently, the usage rate of Chinese dictionaries is several times lower than that of English dictionaries.
The ideal situation would be to sort Chinese characters by shapes through the universally recognized Latin letters, just like Pinyin uses Latin letters for phonetic sorting. This solution would allow Chinese characters to be efficiently organized based on their visual shapes.
This scheme draws on the success of Pinyin, which uses the approximate phonetic sounds of Latin letters to annotate and sort Chinese characters. It relies on the similarity between the shapes of uppercase Latin letters and the components of Chinese characters to sort them systematically. This scheme solves the longstanding problem of efficiently sorting Chinese characters by their shapes, a challenge that has not been adequately addressed for centuries. The solution includes applications like character shape annotation, the shape-sequence sorting method, the First-Character Radical lookup method, pictographic input method, literacy trees, and shape-sequence based teaching method. This scheme, together with the Pinyin system, forms a complete tool for shape annotating, phonetically transcribing, and sorting Chinese characters. It significantly contributes to the learning, usage, and promotion of Chinese characters, enabling them to advance globally on two robust legs—shape and sound.

The "Chinese Character Shape-Sequence Scheme" divides the 560 basic components of Chinese characters, as defined in the GB13000.1 Character Set for Information Processing into four component categories and 25 subcategories, each corresponding to an uppercase letter. The body of the "Chinese Shape-Sequence Dictionary" is arranged according to the alphabetical order of the shape annotation codes of the characters. In the rare cases where characters share the same letters, they are further sorted by the number of strokes. The shape annotation code of a character consists of uppercase Latin letters that resemble the shape of the components within the character. Looking up a Chinese character in this shape-sequence dictionary is like looking up a word in an English dictionary, following the alphabetical order of the component's corresponding letter regardless whether you know the Chinese character or not.
For example, in the dictionary body, the characters are sorted in the order of their shape annotation letters as follows:

• 口 O
• 哎 OHX
• 叱 OL
• 吕 OO
• 咽 OOA
• 品 OOO
• 噪 OOOOM
• 呻 OQ
• 咒 OOR
• 啪 OTB
• 固 OTO
• 咚 OXW

In these examples, according to the shape-sequence sorting method, to look up the character “品”, you would locate it between “OOA" and "OOOOM" by alphabetic order.