Early Access to Early Access Dictionaries

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
For the super-duper-adventurous, if you're running the latest version of Pleco on your iPhone you can register your device at:

(link offline, on sale officially now)

to immediately get access to our 5 "Early Access" new dictionaries, including our long-awaited first Classical Chinese one. If you've previously purchased Oxford and transferred your license to iPhone from Palm/WM but Oxford nonetheless shows up as a demo version, go into Settings / Manage Registration / Check for new purchases and it should automatically activate.

On Android, links to manually download / purchase the 4 new dictionaries (no Oxford since that's already available officially):

Gu Hanyu Da Cidian: Download / Buy
Longman Advanced Chinese Dictionary: Download / Buy
Practical Dictionary of Chinese Medicine: Download / Buy
Chinese Medical Terms List (free): Download

Note that on Android, the links in Longman and PDCM will be a bit wonky - the Longman ones are fixed in the current beta version (see Android forum) and the PDCM ones will be fixed in the next beta version. Links should all work OK in our current iOS app, though. Also, these haven't been updated to use the Android beta version's new character variant format, so all of these dictionaries will behave a bit funny in merged searches in that (won't always merge correctly, especially in Longman) - fixes coming shortly for that.

I should stress right away that this is not by any means all that we have in the pipeline dictionary-wise - it's actually just a small portion (at last count there were something like 20 other dictionaries in various stages of licensing / conversion) - but it should help satisfy the immediate needs of some people for a Classical / TCM dictionary, and give us time to get all of the other stuff we're working on ready.

Specific info on each title (other than Oxford, which we've been selling since 2001 and don't really have much of anything new to tell you about):

Gu Hanyu Da Cidian: Classical-to-modern Chinese dictionary from 上海辞书出版社, known as both the 《古汉语大词典》 and the 《古代汉语大词典》。 (same contents, different cover) $29.95. We've put a LOT of work into cleaning this up (in fact it's the most we've ever spent on a dictionary data file conversion), but there are still a few limitations:

  • Traditional characters: the dictionary was originally in simplified - might seem odd, but normal for Classical dictionaries published in the mainland (in fact this is one of the more traditional-friendly ones), and an awful lot of the Classical Chinese texts floating around (both electronically and in print) are also in simplified. It did include detailed simplified-to-traditional mappings (with specific info on which traditional characters to use in multi-character entries when a single character maps to more than one), and with those we were able to do what we think was a very solid job of covering both character sets in headwords; you should be able to enter words (or look them up in the document reader) reliably in both character sets.

    Definitions in the dictionary did not include traditional at all, but after initially releasing it with definitions forced to be simplified only we got a lot of feedback suggesting that people would prefer even imperfect traditional characters over simplified-only, so we duly ran the simplified text through a simplified-to-traditional converter and included the result; it's decidedly imperfect, and we don't really have the resources to go through and hand-correct every entry (particularly with the added complexity of doing that for Classical Chinese instead of modern), but it should let you avoid simplified at least. We have two other, more traditional-oriented Classical dictionaries in line for later this year if you find this unsatisfactory, though.
  • Pinyin: the dictionary didn't include any Pinyin for multi-character entries, and while that may not be particularly critical anyway (it's not like they were speaking Modern Standard Mandarin when they were writing this stuff), we nonetheless filled it in as well as we could from the single-character Pinyin readings (using both external sources and additional data in the dictionary to fill in). So again, not perfect but should be pretty solid and we'll certainly keep improving it. Also, many characters have more than one Pinyin reading but only show up with the most common one in the dictionary; this is because our current app doesn't have good support for assigning multiple Pinyin readings to the same entry, but we've added that support for our big update so it'll be corrected then.
  • Rare characters: there are a number of characters in here that are so rare that they're not part of any Chinese character encoding standard (even the new Unicode Extension C) and hence not supported by any Chinese font. We've actually gone to the trouble to make bitmap images for all of those (over 1000 in all) - we're getting better about that in general, our long-awaited new-edition Guifan update is probably going to have them too - but our current app doesn't know how to display embedded images in dictionary entries, so they'll be added in a future release.
    Some other characters are too rare for the iPhone / Android Chinese fonts, but will be displayed if you install the Stroke Order Diagrams add-on (which also acts as a fallback font), and some characters are common enough to display with a normal Chinese font but won't be searchable with our handwriting recognizer / radical input; the recent update to our handwriting input on iOS has improved matters a good bit on that front (make sure to enable support for very rare characters in Settings / Panels) but it's still not perfect. All of this should continue to improve in future releases, but we're constrained at the moment by the whole "early access" thing since we're releasing a new database for our old app.

Longman Advanced Chinese Dictionary: 《朗文中文高級新辭典(第二版)》 $24.95. This one's not directly in response to user requests like Classical, but it's another excellent title which we hope many of you will find useful. It's a monolingual traditional-character-only dictionary from Hong Kong, which, rather ironically, only includes Mandarin and not Cantonese readings (does have Cantonese for single characters, but since our software doesn't support searching that yet we've left it out for now); we hope to add Cantonese readings to it ourselves in the future, though. We have a number of other Cantonese titles coming that do include Cantonese readings already - this just happened to be the first thing ready to release, as it was the first Cantonese-friendly dictionary that we licensed (so long ago that our original licensing contact at that publisher has now moved to a different publisher and has already licensed us several other Cantonese dictionaries from that new publisher's catalog :) ). It's completely traditional-only, and like the Classical dictionary it may stay that way in its definitions / examples; however, we are working to add simplified support to headwords at least.

Practical Dictionary of Chinese Medicine by Nigel Wiseman and Ye Feng, $49.95. This is a dictionary of Traditional Chinese Medicine (though we're hoping to have an announcement on the Western medical dictionary front soon), and actually it's more of a "medical reference" rather than just a dictionary; goes into a great deal of detail (often several pages) on the ~6700 terms it covers. For that reason we'd recommend using an iPad as your primary viewer for it - works fine on an iPhone too, but you'll have to do a lot of scrolling. It's not cheap, but it runs less than half of what the printed edition costs (if you can even find it), and this is actually considerably improved from that edition with several thousand new terms and lots of updates / corrections by Wiseman himself. So if you're a professional TCM practitioner / student it should be a truly wonderful thing to have in electronic format.

Chinese Medicine Term List also developed by Wiseman & co; this is free and covers a lot more words than PDCM, but just gives you the translation without any explanations. Also, at the moment it's Chinese-to-English only - for English searches you'll have to go full-text. But again, extremely useful if you're in the TCM field, and you can't beat the price.
 

bokane

举人
Awesome!

Quick question: does the UUID requirement mean that if we've got multiple devices using a single iTunes Store account (e.g., an iPhone and an iPad), the dictionaries will work only on the device whose UUID is registered?

Looking forward to playing around with these!
 

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
bokane said:
Quick question: does the UUID requirement mean that if we've got multiple devices using a single iTunes Store account (e.g., an iPhone and an iPad), the dictionaries will work only on the device whose UUID is registered?

No, it's just a way to get the catalog to show up on your device - all it's really doing is telling our server to send you a list of add-ons that includes these new dictionaries. So if you register each of your devices you can use a single purchase on all of them.
 

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
But we're probably only going to be keeping this device-registering setup for a week or two - basically just until we have the new Android update released so that we can have all of these fully functional on both platforms.
 

gato

状元
Pinyin: the dictionary didn't include any Pinyin for multi-character entries, and while that may not be particularly critical anyway (it's not like they were speaking Modern Standard Mandarin when they were writing this stuff), we nonetheless filled it in as well as we could from the single-character Pinyin readings (using both external sources and additional data in the dictionary to fill in).

Great to see the dictionaries ready, Mike! Just bought the classical and the Longman dictionaries.

Can you give a little more detail about the algorithm you used to assign pinyin reading to multi-character words in the classical dictionary? What do you mean by the "addtional data in the dictionary", for instance? I just wanted to know, in case I see something weird. As you might know, classical Chinese characters often have different reading than the same characters in modern Chinese, at least in terms of the standard reading taught in school. Sometimes a character would have a different reading in a chengyu than either alone or as used in other words.
 

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
gato said:
Can you give a little more detail about the algorithm you used to assign pinyin reading to multi-character words in the classical dictionary? What do you mean by the "addtional data in the dictionary", for instance? I just wanted to know, in case I see something weird. As you might know, classical Chinese characters often have different reading than the same characters in modern Chinese, at least in terms of the standard reading taught in school. Sometimes a character would have a different reading in a chengyu than either alone or as used in other words.

Basically, the original print dictionary provides several Pinyin readings (with explanations) for each character, ranked by order of frequency, but then also tags any multi-character entry that uses something other than the most frequent reading with the correct one. So really we just had to combine that data and then check it against other sources. We didn't spend as much time on this as on traditional character support, though, since that seemed a lot more critical, but we are going to continue improving it so that it behaves nicely with our new merged search algorithm (which uses Pinyin as one of its main factors in deciding whether or not two entries from different dictionaries should be merged in the results).
 

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
Just pushed a small update to GHYDCD - there was a glitch that could cause certain Pinyin searches to pull up words that didn't match them at all, which should be fixed in this version.
 
Thank you - having these early is enormously helpful, and a reflection of how much Pleco cares about it's customers.

I can now officially end my reliance on Handian and the computer for reading ancient texts, and turn everything over to Pleco.
 

scykei

榜眼
Hmm... I actually want a classical Chinese dictionary since I occasionally encounter classical texts. I have took a quick glance at the demo version and it seems to be working good enough for my needs. But will there be any other classical ones to be released soon?
 

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
scykei said:
Hmm... I actually want a classical Chinese dictionary since I occasionally encounter classical texts. I have took a quick glance at the demo version and it seems to be working good enough for my needs. But will there be any other classical ones to be released soon?

Yes, but the next two will cost substantially more and neither one is explicitly geared towards Classical, so this should be a good purchase even after those are out.
 

Alexis

状元
I registered my UDID, and refreshed my "Add-Ons" list in Pleco (multiple times), but don't see any options for new dictionaries.
 

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
Alexis said:
I registered my UDID, and refreshed my "Add-Ons" list in Pleco (multiple times), but don't see any options for new dictionaries.

That's odd... are you running the latest update (2.2.13)? If you're running iOS 6, did you make sure to register the "UUID" from the Pleco "Contact Support" screen rather than the UDID? (Apple's making everybody switch away from UDIDs)
 

Alexis

状元
Thanks Mike. I had bee
mikelove said:
Alexis said:
I registered my UDID, and refreshed my "Add-Ons" list in Pleco (multiple times), but don't see any options for new dictionaries.

That's odd... are you running the latest update (2.2.13)? If you're running iOS 6, did you make sure to register the "UUID" from the Pleco "Contact Support" screen rather than the UDID? (Apple's making everybody switch away from UDIDs)

Ah, I was registering my UDID from iTunes. Once I registered the UUID from the "Contact Support" page it worked marvelously. Thanks Mike!
 
Really appreciate this. :D

Great to have OX back in the 'ole pleco.

GH seems pretty standard in comparison to the paperback classical dictionaries i've come across. Handy to (finally) have a digital.

LMA was a lovely surprise also -- it has some 俗语 and a few 歇后语 scattered about in there -- quite awesome. Another feature I've come across in LMA is an explanation of relatively close or easily confused words (GF does this as well to a certain extent but certainly not as detailed (LMA even has example scenteces in this part!))
LMA said:
嘹亮
liáo liàng
聲音清脆響亮:歌聲嘹亮。

【嘹亮•響亮】
liáo liàng / xiǎng liàng
都是形容詞﹐都形容聲音大。區別在:①「嘹亮」着重表示聲音清脆而響亮;「響亮」着重表示聲音宏大。②「嘹亮」只形容歌聲﹑樂器聲等;「響亮」除形容歌聲﹑樂器聲外﹐還可形容其他宏亮的聲音﹐如「響亮的鞭炮聲」。

PD is quite exceptional. Although I'm not exactly studing CM or anything specifically to do with CM (at least at the moment), I still seem to run in to these things or references to these things in day-to-day life -- not to mention my curiosity or desire to comprehend what *exactly* is been spoken of -- and PD deals with these things excellently. Here's an example, in case you are wondering what I'm on about.
Let's take the word 心包 - I ran into this a while back when PD had not even come out so all I came up with:
ABC said:
心包
xīnbāo
N. <bio.> pericardium
(PLC, ADS, CC (as far as English translations/explanations go) all pretty much had the same thing)

but PD on the hand:

PD said:
pericardium
心包
xīn bāo
Also pericardiac network [vessel]. The outer covering of the heart. It is traditionally held that evils invading the heart first affect the pericardium, so that conditions such as ``clouded spirit'' (stupor) and delirious mania due to high fever were termed heat entering the pericardium. By contrast, mental derangement due to phlegm-damp was termed phlegm turbidity (the turbid aspect of phlegm) clouding the pericardium. Both these conditions are in reality heart diseases.

My two cents for anyone on the fence about these.

-----------------------------------------

mikelove said:
I should stress right away that this is not by any means all that we have in the pipeline dictionary-wise - it's actually just a small portion (at last count there were something like 20 other dictionaries in various stages of licensing / conversion) - but it should help satisfy the immediate needs of some people for a Classical / TCM dictionary, and give us time to get all of the other stuff we're working on ready.

mikelove said:
scykei said:
Hmm... I actually want a classical Chinese dictionary since I occasionally encounter classical texts. I have took a quick glance at the demo version and it seems to be working good enough for my needs. But will there be any other classical ones to be released soon?

Yes, but the next two will cost substantially more and neither one is explicitly geared towards Classical, so this should be a good purchase even after those are out.

Any hints as to what's coming in the future? (well besides canto that is.... :roll: )
 

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
ACardiganAndAFrown said:
LMA was a lovely surprise also -- it has some 俗语 and a few 歇后语 scattered about in there -- quite awesome. Another feature I've come across in LMA is an explanation of relatively close or easily confused words (GF does this as well to a certain extent but certainly not as detailed (LMA even has example scenteces in this part!))

Cool - it's an interesting title, doesn't exactly fill any specific slot / request (unlike Classical) but there's a lot of good information in there. (more still once we have it supporting simplified searches, which should happen soon)

ACardiganAndAFrown said:
PD is quite exceptional. Although I'm not exactly studing CM or anything specifically to do with CM (at least at the moment), I still seem to run in to these things or references to these things in day-to-day life -- not to mention my curiosity or desire to comprehend what *exactly* is been spoken of -- and PD deals with these things excellently. Here's an example, in case you are wondering what I'm on about.
Let's take the word 心包 - I ran into this a while back when PD had not even come out so all I came up with:

Cool - really happy to be involved in re-issuing this, it was getting very hard to find in stores. And hopefully its success in Pleco will inspire / help to fund its further development.

ACardiganAndAFrown said:
Any hints as to what's coming in the future? (well besides canto that is.... )

I'm trying not to mention things publicly that I haven't yet, but I've mentioned in a few places that we've recently licensed a couple of thesaurus-like dictionaries (synonyms, antonyms and a classified dictionary) and are trying to sort out the best way to make all of that data accessible in Pleco. (the synonym dictionary is basically just an entire book full of those entries-explaining-how-two-similar-words-differ)
 

alanmd

探花
PD is absolutely fascinating, for once a dictionary that can be read from cover to cover! So much invaluable terminology for discussions with my Chinese mother-in-law...!
 

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
alanmd said:
PD is absolutely fascinating, for once a dictionary that can be read from cover to cover! So much invaluable terminology for discussions with my Chinese mother-in-law...!

Cool. Perhaps we've underestimated PD's "cultural literacy" potential... I should talk to Nigel about producing some kind of a mini version that cuts out the technical stuff but just explains these various concepts to a non-expert.
 

laobaigou

举人
Just bought GHYDCD. Very nice!! And one particularly nice thing you can do when you are looking up a dictionary entry containing a "zi" that you don't know in GHYDCD is to look it up in the definition pane using another dictionary; sort of a mini-recursive look up - e.g. If one were looking up "安" in GHYDCD and didn't know the meaning of "全", in the "安全" definition then one can just click on the "全" character and see its def in PLC or some other dictionary, without having to drop back to the dictionary itself to do this. Has any thought been given to making this sort of mini-recursion work directly in the Document File Reader? Now that would be very useful!! :?:
 

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
laobaigou said:
Just bought GHYDCD. Very nice!! And one particularly nice thing you can do when you are looking up a dictionary entry containing a "zi" that you don't know in GHYDCD is to look it up in the definition pane using another dictionary; sort of a mini-recursive look up - e.g. If one were looking up "安" in GHYDCD and didn't know the meaning of "全", in the "安全" definition then one can just click on the "全" character and see its def in PLC or some other dictionary, without having to drop back to the dictionary itself to do this. Has any thought been given to making this sort of mini-recursion work directly in the Document File Reader? Now that would be very useful!! :?:

Already supported, actually, via the confusingly-iconed > button - tap on that to get a full-screen version of the definition which you can then do tap-lookups in (and so ad infinitum, or very nearly so since once you get deep enough iOS will start discarding the older screens for you to free up memory so you can keep going).
 
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