An exemplary method includes receiving stroke information for a partially written East Asian character, the East Asian character representable by one or more radicals; based on the stroke information, selecting a radical on a prefix tree wherein the prefix tree branches to East Asian characters as end states; identifying one or more East Asian characters as end states that correspond to the selected radical for the partially written East Asian character; and receiving user input to verify that one of the identified one or more East Asian characters is the end state for the partially written East Asian character. In such a method, the selection of a radical can occur using radical-based hidden Markov models. Various other exemplary methods, devices, systems, etc., are also disclosed.