1. A computer-implemented method for recognizing user handwriting, the method comprising: receiving digital ink based on handwriting received from a user; identifying words within the received digital ink; for an identified word, identifying segments within the word that are potential characters or parts of characters of the word, the segments having an order, wherein at least some characters are composed of multiple segments; applying a classifier to each segment of the word to compute a set of segment probabilities for each segment, each segment having a respective set of probabilities, each segment probability indicating a probability that the segment is a particular part of a particular letter, wherein each set of probabilities for a segment comprises probabilities that the segment corresponds to various parts of various letters according to the shape classifier; applying a language model to alternatives to compute scores for the alternatives, respectively, each alternative comprising one probability from each set of probabilities, the probabilities of each alternative ordered according to the order of the segments, the language model computing a score for an alternative according to bigram probabilities corresponding to the letters, the bigram probabilities computed in advance from a corpora, each bigram indicating a probability that two letters occur in succession, each score of an alternative further computed according to probabilities segments in the alternative are successive parts of a same letter, each score of an alternative further computed according to probabilities the segments thereof are end segments of a letter corresponding to the alternative; selecting a recognition result for the word based on the determined scores, the recognition result comprising the alternative corresponding to a selected one of the scores.