We have the internet, Unicode, and powerful computers now, so I suspect the dictionary situation is quite different from 1991. I don't know much about Chinese i

We have the internet, Unicode, and powerful computers now, so I suspect the dictionary situation is quite different from 1991. I don't know much about Chinese in particular -- my foreign language was Japanese -- but I have recently looked up kanji using a variety of search engines, including tools that allow you to draw characters. (For example: http://kanji.sljfaq.org/draw.html http://kanji.sljfaq.org/draw.html) If you have the kanji as text, it's not much more difficult to look up an unfamiliar word in Japanese than it is in English, although it may still be difficult to figure out the exact sense if the writing isn't literal. For example, suppose you're trying to read something on the Japanese Wikipedia. I'm horribly out of practice, but I can still go and take something like "第六回執筆コンテストの入選記事が決定しました。結果発表をご覧下さい。" (found on the front page of ja.wikipedia.org) and reason that it means something along the lines of "The best articles of the sixth writing competition have been chosen. Please look at the results." just by copying the parts I'm unfamiliar with into a kanji search engine like Jlex (http://jlex.org/ http://jlex.org/) a bit at a time until I get something reasonable back.