I’m learning traditional Chinese using Taiwan’s 華語八千詞 database. That’s the 8000 most common Mandarin Chinese characters according to Taiwan’s Ministry of Education (教育部)
It helps much to understand the character’s etymologies and to that end I’m using this online database. Problem is, I like studying outdoors where no internet is available, hence the downloadable database I’m looking for.
It doesn’t have to include explanations in English, just how characters are decomposed and what variations are used (like heart is written in some characters like 忄as in 忻 instead of using the full radical 心)
Or if somebody knows how to download the whole set of images of the webpage I linked maintaining it’s structure…
The database I linked is also available as a book (Chinese Characters: A Genealogy and Dictionary, English and Mandarin Chinese Edition) but is so poorly printed characters are sometimes extremely difficult to read.
You mean like a table of Chinese radicals?
Traditional https://www.archchinese.com/traditional_chinese_radicals.html
Simplified https://www.archchinese.com/arch_chinese_radicals.html
Or even Japanese kanji radicals, which are similar to traditional Chinese:
https://www.nihongomaster.com/kanji-radicals
Just save the websites in their entirety, and open the html file with a browser. They don’t take up much space.
I highly recommend the Outlier Dictionary, an addon for Pleco. It covers about 4000 characters, so won’t include very rare ones like 忻. Pleco itself will show basic decompositions like 忻 = 忄+ 斤.
There used to be an offline mobile app for HanziCraft, but the app seems to be gone now (a little annoying, since I’m pretty sure I paid for it).
I can’t read Chinese, so not speaking from personal familiarity, but my guess is that any etymology is going to be spotty in coverage. My understanding is that millennia-old written Chinese is still readable by someone who knows contemporary Chinese, which is going to mean that the origins of characters are going to extend back to a period where one is going to have limited records and preserved written works.
