15/03/2009

Chinese Characters Make me Dizzy

I spent a good part of this morning looking for the Chinese character of my little girl's middle name. The only copy I had of her name is from the birth certificate of hers which I had conveniently stick a typed-out character which was sent to me by the girls' Godma. This name was specially selected for her at birth then and I wanted to print it out on sticker form so that she can have her Chinese character name stuck on some of her belongings that called for Chinese characters.

I looked and looked for the character, by which the Hanyu Pinyin was Li. There were so many types of 'Li' available but none I saw had hers. I remembered it was selected from a special book on names so perhaps that is why it is not as common everywhere else? I found some characters that had the first part of her name and some had the second part of the name. But I had no software like Freehand which I could convert them into outline form to cut and paste from.

The only thing I knew how to use was the Paint program... and I had no Photoshop in my pc... Darn!

I played around in Paint for a bit then decided that it could be done. I had copied the two characters in Word and I increased their font size larger so that when it is reduced, it will be sharp. I made sure the two characters had the same size, then copied them into Paint. In Paint, I erased the parts I did not need and then close them up by selecting the needed characters close to the other one and...

Voila! I have her 'Li' finally!

Ah... so Paint is not as daunting as I thought.. though I wished I had Freehand or Illustrator... really.

10 comments:

jepunlauee said...

you are right,hoon..chinese charaters are very confusing for us.."banana"..hahaha..I can read a few but can't write them..

Kimmy Suzuki said...

Oh!As for me is more worst!!!So shy tht sometimes I can`t read some of the chinese charaters even tht i`m from chinese education but i can write it!Hahaaa...Maybe coz of long time didn`t learn it oledi guess tht`s the reason!Hehehe...

amycheah said...

ah hoon, really hairan dunno why I cannot see your inserted pics in your Sunny blog. Even I right click and select "show picture", the picture also didn't turn up leh! But other blogs of yours is no problem at all wo!

Nick Phillips (15/03/1967 - 04/11/2022) said...

Not bad work using paint what :D

amycheah said...

I can see the pics now ah hoon. In fact, the word is Simplify Chinese written format. If it is an olden chinese written(my time of chinese...hehehe), it shd be like this 瓅.

Family First said...

Gosh! You reminded me that I better learn to write my son's name lah .. 2 yrs old already still no idea how to write in chinese characters! Hahaa!

Anonymous said...

Good job! Chinese characters are not so easy.

Mom Knows Everything said...

You did a great job on those with Paint. I can never get it to work that well for me. :o(

Anonymous said...

To me, english is more difficult than Chinese.

I try to search the word for you, but seem like not available in the internet.

There are many people facing your same problem too, check it out.
http://iask.sina.com.cn/b/10839123.html

Lee said...

Hi Constance, I always admire people who can read and write Chinese characters.

I found out there are 1700 characters in the Chinese written language and at most only about 700 is used, and these by the media.

You have fun and keep well Constance, best regards, Lee.