As we all know, the training of listening, speaking, reading and writing skills involved in language application is limited by the amount of vocabulary of users of the language.

At present, on the one hand, restricted by the teacher's limited energy, it is impossible for the teacher to teach the learners how to correctly write each Chinese character and explain its meaning; on the other hand, there are many online dictionaries on the Internet, which are not only equipped with an animation to demonstrate the stroke order of writing a Chinese character correctly, but also provide the meaning translation and usage of each Chinese character. However, these resources are used very low because the beginners learning Chinese do not have effective means for retrieval. Therefore, how to make full use of the internet resources available to foreign Chinese learners to independently learn Chinese characters and quickly expand their Chinese vocabulary should be the implied meaning of "A master is responsible for teaching basic knowledge, and further study depends on one's own efforts", and also the task goal that TCFL should achieve.

However, the Internet application of Chinese language poses new challenges to teaching Chinese as a foreign language (TCFL for short). The traditional practice of ignoring the Internet application of Chinese has been difficult to adapt to the urgent needs of foreign Chinese learners and users in the Internet Era. In other words, in the face of the Internet application of Chinese, should the TCHL keep pace with the times and expand and improve the teaching content?

For example, as shown in the figure below, Tom in the picture has just begun to learn Chinese for three months. His basic situation is as follows:

Fig.1 Tom Looking forward to Looking up the Chinese Character Dictionary

1. He has been familiar with the pronunciation of each Pinyin;
2. He has completely mastered the basic stroke knowledge of Chinese characters;
3. He has learned some of the most commonly used radicals.

But, he did not know the character "李", and no one around him could tell him how to pronounce the Chinese character "李", or what its pinyin is, furthermore, he hasn't mastered the Chinese character query method such as stroke (According to David Moser in his article "Why Chinese Is So Damn Hard?" complaining foreigners learning Chinese character dictionary query method, just like learning a time consuming art)···. That is to say, Tom in the picture can't input the new character "李" into the e-dictionary at this time. In fact, just at this very time, Pinyin has lost any value to Tom! And the significance of modern science and technology for teaching foreigners to master the correct writing of Chinese characters has disappeared.

In addition, for those foreigners and Chinese who have mastered the same number of Chinese characters, the speed of using computers to input characters is also greatly different. For example, the same master of 500 Chinese characters, also knowing the two characters "蜂" and "蜜", but the Chinese people in the process of growing up can learn the difference between "蜂蜜" and "蜜蜂" naturally from the surrounding language environment, while 99.5% of foreign Chinese learners around the world do not have this environmental advantage to naturally accumulate their vocabulary. It is for these and other reasons that American Sinologist David Moser came to the conclusion that Chinese is "losing the battle of languages" in the Internet" (See Chapter 15 "A Losing Battle: The Internet" in A Billion Voices: China's Search For A Common Language by David Moser).

But actually, paperless Chinese office in the information age is also an application form of "Chinese language" in the "virtual world", or in other words, "virtual world" is also an application spot of Chinese language which is an unavoidable problem in TCFL. In this era, Chinese teaching as a foreign language should be in addition to the traditional listening, speaking, reading and writing, and add a "keyboard" application which can reflect the basic characteristic of the Internet era of Chinese with the times.

However, as to the keyboard application of Chinese, in the face of foreigners' Chinese learning and application in the VIRTUAL WORLD, the biggest dilemma of the TCFL is reflected in the following two aspects: one is that the efficiency barrier of querying e-dictionary is insurmountable, the other is that the efficiency of Chinese keywriting (namely writing by keyboard or typing) is too low due to the limited vocabulary. For example, when an Arab learns German, he can master German letters and phonetic symbols in two months. After that, he can independently and efficiently search for new German words in any time and space. However, it also took him two or three months to master the Chinese Pinyin, the basic knowledge of strokes and some common radicals of Chinese characters, it didn't mean that he had the convenience of dictionary inquiry for learning new Chinese characters. As a result, when foreigners are learning Chinese, their vocabulary accumulation speed is much lower than when they learn alphabetic language. In view of this, the foreigners' acquisition of the speed of keywriting Chinese characters which is equal to that of Chinese people and satisfactory is almost hopeless.

As the saying goes, the problem is the opportunity of invention and creation. It is because of the new challenges of the TCSL in the Internet era and the dilemma of being unable to cover all-sides due to the teachers' limited energy in the traditional teaching of correct writing of Chinese characters that the Easy Chinese Code™ (ECCode™) and the concept of dynamic independent learning of Chinese based on it have been born at the right moment. Its integrated design with the online dictionary solves the above two problems well and provides the technical feasibility for making the task goal of the TCSL keep pace with the times in the Internet era (See Figure 2 below).

Fig.2 Illustration of Application Model of Correct Chinese character Stroke Order and Literacy Dictionary

Finally, we make a tabular comparison of human-computer dialogue tools for Chinese character information processing, so that readers can have an overall understanding of these tools.