LiuChan

LiuChan Chinese Popup Dictionary

LiuChan (liú chàng) is an extension for chrome that allows you to mouse-over Chinese to instantly lookup the dictionary.

It started out as a port of RikaiChan (and its Rikai derivatives) and has since grown into an extension that has been completely rewritten with greatly improved performance and new features.

Current Features

• Instantaneous translation of Chinese characters and words on mouse over
• Synchronized settings across all your devices
• Text input support
• A handy little notepad that you can open on any page :)
• Theme support
• Fuzzy search! Use chrome’s omnibox to search the dictionary using hanzi, pinyin or just plain english
• Dictionaries automatically update to newer versions

Usage

Mouse Over Dictionary: Simply enable the extension and mouse over Chinese on a page!

Fuzzy search: Type ‘lc’ in the omnibox followed by whatever term you want to look for (Chinese, pinyin or English), the results will show up as suggestions.

To Do

• Add Cantonese dictionary
• Add word lists/Anki support
• Move fuzzy search to its own input box as opposed to omnibox so that it can be expanded upon (eg. use rich formatting, etc)

Why is it called LiuChan?

流畅 (liú chàng) stands for fluency in a language. I kept -Chan as an homage to its origin.

Troubleshooting

If anything malfunctions, your best bet is disabling and re-enabling the extension and reloading the page you want it to work on.

In case a problem persists please open an issue on github and try to describe as clearly as possible how to recreate the problem.

Known issues:

Currently fuzzy search isn’t ‘fuzzy’ enough to match regular vowels with tonemarked ones.