Chinese Support 3 + POS/Radical (extend by Jackie)

This add-on is a fork of Chinese Support 3 (Gustaf-C), the actively maintained continuation of the original Chinese Support lineage. It adds automatic Part of Speech and Radical field filling on top of the existing Hanzi/Pinyin/English/Bopomofo auto-fill. Released under the same license (GNU GPLv3) as required by that license.

Everything in this add-on except _jackie_patch.py, _jackie_lookup.py and data/pos_radical/ is unmodified code from Chinese Support 3 — see those files for what's new.

Credit

Chinese Support:

• V1. chinese-support-addon
  • Author: Thomas TEMPÉ
  • Wiki: Chinese Support Wiki
• V2. Chinese Support Redux v0.14.2
  • AnkiWeb: AddonPage
  • Author: JD Lorimer
• V3. Chinese Support 3 — this fork's base
  • AnkiWeb: AddonPage
  • Author: Gustaf-C
  • Contributors: Kieran Black
  • Actively maintained; as of 2026 this is the recommended base (see note below)

Related fork (not included in this add-on, mentioned for context):

• "Chinese Support V4 (Fixed by Shige)" — a maintenance fork of V3 by Shigeyuki. As of 2026-05-01 Shigeyuki himself notes V4 is "no longer needed" now that V3 has caught up, and recommends using V3. This add-on is therefore built directly on V3, not V4.

Related addon:<br>

• Korean Support
  • AnkiWeb: AddonPage
  • Author: Scott Gigante

This fork — extended by Jackie (2026):

• Part of Speech field auto-fill — TOCFL/TBCL word lists, falls back to jieba POS tagging (reuses the jieba already bundled in lib/)
• Radical field auto-fill — the 214 Kangxi radicals making up the Hanzi field, with reading + meaning
• Both configurable in Vietnamese or English (language config key)
• Bulk Fill -> POS / Bulk Fill -> Radical menu items (Tools -> Chinese -> Bulk Fill) to backfill existing notes in the current deck, same as the other Bulk Fill options
• Chinese (Advanced) built-in note type now includes Part of Speech and Radical fields out of the box (Chinese (Basic) intentionally left untouched, to keep it minimal)

How to use

• The templates can be found under 'Choose Note Type' -> 'Manage' -> 'Add'
• If you find that a field is not filling at all, please check config.json for the complete list of valid field names. For those migrating from an older version of the add-on, you will need to rename any definition fields to English, German or French, depending on what you want.

Features

• Automatic field filling
  • Translation (from built-in dictionary; supports English, German and French)
  • Romanisation (supports Pīnyīn (拼音) and Cantonese Jyutping (粵拼))
  • Mandarin Audio (fetched from Google or Baidu)
  • Traditional (繁體字) and simplified (簡體字) characters
  • Bopomofo (ㄅㄆㄇㄈ), also known as Zhuyin (注音)
  • Rubies (small-print transcription placed above characters)
  • Frequency (from "very basic" to "obscure") - based on anki-chinese-word-frequency
  • Usage Sentence Examples - Chinese/English sentence pairs from Tatoeba
  • Part of Speech (New) — from TOCFL/TBCL word lists, falls back to jieba POS tagging
  • Radical (New) — the Kangxi radical(s) making up the Hanzi field, with reading + meaning
• Automatic tone change of auto filled pinyin (hanzi field must be populated)
  • E.g. fen1kai1 -> Tab -> fēnkāi (won't replace existing tones)
• Tone colours (applied to characters, romanisation and Bopomofo)
• Built-in note types (Basic and Advanced)

Usage

The core feature of the add-on is the automatic field filling. To take advantage of this, you need to have an Anki note type with the appropriate fields (e.g., Hanzi, English, Pinyin, Sound, POS, Radical). See config.json for a list of valid field names.

If you don't already have such a note type, the easiest approach is to use one of the built-in models. Two types are installed automatically: Basic and Advanced. The only important difference is that the Advanced model shows more information.

To use the field-filling features:

1. Add a new note to Anki (press a)
2. Create (manage -> add) and select Chinese (Basic) or Chinese (Advanced) as the note type
3. Enable Chinese Support for this note type (click 汉字)
4. Enter a word (e.g., 電話) into the Hanzi field (sentences will also work)
5. Press Tab
6. The remaining fields (including POS and Radical, if your note type has those fields) should then be populated automatically

POS / Radical language

By default POS and Radical text are filled in English. Set "language": "vi" in the add-on config (Tools -> Add-ons -> Config) to get Vietnamese instead.

Status

This is a hobby fork maintained on a best-effort basis. The upstream Chinese Support 3 project is itself labelled beta by its author ("it works, but I wouldn't trust it with my children") — please back up your collection before trying any Chinese-support add-on. The POS/Radical additions in this fork have been tested manually but not against an automated test suite.

Known issues

• POS/Radical field names must currently match the entries in config.json's fields.pos / fields.radical (or be added there) to be recognized.
• Bulk Fill -> All does not fill POS/Radical (it only knows about upstream's own field categories) — run Bulk Fill -> POS / Bulk Fill -> Radical separately if you want those backfilled too.
• The built-in Chinese (Basic) model still doesn't have POS/Radical fields (only Chinese (Advanced) does) — add them manually if you use Basic.
• See the upstream Chinese Support 3 issue tracker for issues unrelated to POS/Radical.