"At first, I just wanted to invent a dictionary," he said. He found that the design of dictionaries was far less scientific than it is now when he was at school. It was common to spend three or four minutes looking up an unfamiliar word in a dictionary. At that time, he thought that when he grew up, he would design a new lookup method and invent a new dictionary so that everyone could find characters more conveniently. In 1972, he began to devote his spare time to the anticipated character lookup method, trying to use factors such as Chinese character radicals and strokes more cleverly to look up characters. From the initial concept to testing one by one each Chinese character, he was busy every night until after 10 p.m.. Even after lying down, he was still practicing words in his mind. "I was like being obsessed with it during that period, and I don't know how much scratch paper I used." After 15 years, he finally settled on the lookup method and designed the dictionary. Later, because he needed to self-finance 80,000 to 100,000 yuan to publish it, he had to shelve this matter due to his poor family situation.