LantauMama - making healthy living accessible
  • Blog
    • Family Fun
    • Cantonese School
    • About Me
  • Classes
  • Events
  • Shop
  • Links

Chinese Writing Practice

24/10/2013

0 Comments

 
Print Friendly and PDF
I struggle with this every day with my kids.  They have a Chinese dictation every week, although this is in Mandarin it requires the standard traditional HK character set as used by the text books and education department.  

I was using Hanlexon and even paid for their service, but then we discovered a big problem. Some of the characters, due to the Hanlexon font, which is not a standard HK font, were coming out wrong - certain strokes too long or too short or just plain wrong.

My emotions bordered between failure and frustration, this was the ONE thing I could do for my kids to help them with Chinese - create worksheets and practice with them.  And now I can't...

I have written to Hanlexon, and I am investigating other options, but nothing certain has been discovered.  I could list 10 other Chinese worksheet generator sites, but none of them are specific to Hong Kong, so I don't think they resolve the issue.

What I have learned from my own research is this:

For the Mac it is best to use these fonts for Cantonese:

儷黑 Pro and 儷宋 Pro

I am begging the school to provide practice sheets for the students, especially in the lower primary years where it is not easy for students to copy the characters from the book accurately.  

Here are some very visual examples to see - more on the PDF, do look at that.
The below image taken from the CIO website of the HK Gov
Picture
I've made this PDF to show a really clear example of how important it is to use the correct font when teaching Cantonese to students.

The 'wrong' font literally has different strokes and if written like that would be marked wrong on homework and tests.

cantonesefonts.pdf
File Size: 67 kb
File Type: pdf
Download File


These two links are really helpful:

http://www.ogcio.gov.hk/en/business/tech_promotion/ccli/hkscs/

http://www.yale.edu/chinesemac/pages/character_sets.html"

Hong Kong SCS

Except from the website:

"In 1995, the government of Hong Kong created its own extension to Big Five, calling it the Government Common Character Set (GCCS). In 1999, they revised it and renamed it the Hong Kong Supplementary Character Set (HKSCS or Hong Kong SCS). It was updated in 2001, 2004, and 2008, for a current total of 4,568 traditional-form hanzi.

Unicode 4.1 (2005) and HKSCS-2004 are fully coordinated, and Unicode 5.2 (2009) and HKSCS-2008 are fully coordinated. Thus, all HKSCS characters map to Unicode characters. HKSCS-2008 is the last version that will be published with Big Five code points.

The Traditional Chinese Input Method in Mac OS X 10.3 and above supports HKSCS-2001 in the fonts LiHei 儷黑 Pro and LiSong 儷宋 Pro.

Charset name: BIG5-HKSCS.

http://www.ogcio.gov.hk/ccli/eng/hkscs/ "

Some other links that go into more detail:

http://www.ogcio.gov.hk/en/business/tech_promotion/ccli/cliac/glyphs_guidelines.htm

http://glyph.iso10646hk.net/english/ginfo.jsp
0 Comments

Your comment will be posted after it is approved.


Leave a Reply.

    Categories

    All
    Cantonese
    Hong Kong
    Kids
    Kindergarten
    Primary
    School

    Archives

    August 2014
    November 2013
    October 2013
    September 2013

    RSS Feed

Thank you so much for taking the time to visit Lantau Mama, truly I am flattered that anyone reads this!  
Feel free to contact me anytime via LantauMama @ Twitter I would love to hear from you.
The links below are how I try to cover my hosting costs without using advertisements.
My Iherb Page
Weebly Discount Link