Sorry for slow reply (and slow unscreening). Glad to see I'm not the only one who thinks menus are a good route into learning Chinese!
I do have a few Chinese friends, and some of them can read Chinese. In fact, since I made the cheat-sheet pictured above, one of them helped me identify one of the missing characters; I just wanted to show a picture of a cheat-sheet with scribbles on, so I didn't make a fresh one.
There are quite a few handwriting recognition tools available on the web — you don't need an iPad or iPhone (I also don't have either). I use the one at ChineseTools.com. Once you get used to recognising radicals, looking things up by radical (e.g. on CantoDict) can help too.
The tricky thing about the menu transcribed above (here's a photo of the actual menu) is that it uses a few characters that seem to be omitted from many dictionaries (e.g. 蛏/chēng), so handwriting recognition didn't help in this case.
Re: Chinese menus
I do have a few Chinese friends, and some of them can read Chinese. In fact, since I made the cheat-sheet pictured above, one of them helped me identify one of the missing characters; I just wanted to show a picture of a cheat-sheet with scribbles on, so I didn't make a fresh one.
There are quite a few handwriting recognition tools available on the web — you don't need an iPad or iPhone (I also don't have either). I use the one at ChineseTools.com. Once you get used to recognising radicals, looking things up by radical (e.g. on CantoDict) can help too.
The tricky thing about the menu transcribed above (here's a photo of the actual menu) is that it uses a few characters that seem to be omitted from many dictionaries (e.g. 蛏/chēng), so handwriting recognition didn't help in this case.