Dictionaries for reading street signs

[porkbird]

Hi,

I'm going to China for a 14 days trip, and I'm planning on using Pleco OCR module occasionally to read street signs, information on timetables and other printed text. I never learned Chinese and I know almost nothing of it. I'm wondering whether free dictionaries included with Pleco are good enough to read most of street signs, or I would need to get the paid addons for this (if so, which one would you recommend)?

Thank you.

 

[mikelove]

I'm going to China for a 14 days trip, and I'm planning on using Pleco OCR module occasionally to read street signs, information on timetables and other printed text. I never learned Chinese and I know almost nothing of it. I'm wondering whether free dictionaries included with Pleco are good enough to read most of street signs, or I would need to get the paid addons for this (if so, which one would you recommend)?

They should be adequate, but to be honest this isn't necessarily a great plan in general - it's difficult to use OCR effectively without knowing at least a little bit of Chinese. It's not 100% reliable, so you want to have the ability to see that it's recognized a character incorrectly, and for signs that include more than one or two words you're probably also going to need to know a bit of Chinese grammar in order to piece together the meaning effectively.

But for looking up the meanings of words on signs that are clear enough for it to recognize accurately, the built-in dictionaries should be OK.

 

[Wan]

Also, most signs will have pinyin below the characters. However, that is not the case somewhere in the province or on timetables in small train or bus stations. Mostly, you'll find someone speaking decent English who is willing to help, though! Don't worry