For beginners, we may guess the meaning of a character but do not know the pronunciation for the character. Pinyin input will then be useless. One way to get around the problem is to look for the character based on its meaning. For example, we may type English and hope the translation for the English word will give us the Chinese. The following tool is designed to do exactly that:

English input

You may try it and find it very useful for non-native Chinese speakers. Note the online program runs JavaScript. If your browser security setting does not allow JavaScript, you may need to enable it.