Pros/cons of oxford dictionaries

[markoshun]

Can't seem to find descriptions/reviews, pros/cons of the various dictionaries. Started out going to add the pocket oxford and noticed the oxford. But besides there obviously being more entries I can't seem to find advantages or disadvantages. Can there be too much info for a novice? I'm second year but relatively casual learner. (2000 flashcards at various levels of learning.)
I think it would at least make a nice addition for an e-c alternative to 21c and abc... ? 21c is pretty much useless to me without pinyin. And abc sometimes makes translation suggestions that downright confuse my Taiwanese tutors.

 

[yoose]

I have a similar question, but also looking to compare the oxford with the other ones, seems like you don’t find the 21st century and ABC ones very useful.

 

[markoshun]

Actually it's only the 21c that I don't use because my character reading level is so low. I need pinyin, and anticipate this will always be the case.
My comment about ABC e-c could probably be applied to translation in general. -I use ABC a lot-
But very hard for me to choose a translated English word from a dictionary, on my own, that is going to actually fit for my tutors. (especially since I am learning Taiwan based Chinese)
The new multi dictionary view is going to help with this I think.

 

[denmitch]

Tuttle was my all-time favorite beginning learner dictionary in Pleco. It gives deeper definition and use examples. Of course with the v3.0 the Sents option provides this from all available dictionaries. Still I recommend Tuttle for someone who thinks themselves a novice, though, 2000 flashcards does not say 'novice' to me.

 

[mikelove]

Neither Oxford includes a ton of Pinyin - none at all for example sentences, and only the Pocket Oxford includes it in its English-Chinese definitions. (the big Oxford just lists Chinese words) So if you want Pinyin everywhere then you would probably be better off with the ABC, NWP, or Tuttle, which are the only 100% Pinyin-equipped dictionaries we currently offer.

 

[markoshun]

So if you want Pinyin everywhere then you would probably be better off with the ABC, NWP, or Tuttle, which are the only 100% Pinyin-equipped dictionaries we currently offer.

Ok, that clears the Oxford question up. Thanks Mike. You are everywhere
I have ABC set up for e-c, with 21c, but that's it.
CC and Tuttle are just c-e, right. (Have you dropped CC? It's not listed in my add-ons anymore. It's good for Taiwan-based learning) Doesn't Pleco also work as an e-c? No e-c in free version?
But I can't find NWP anywhere. Should that have been part of my original bundle? I bought a bundle originally with the iPod quite a few years ago, then again for Android, now the iPhone.
If not, no problem. Demo looks good, will just buy it.
Thanks

 

[mikelove]

CC is built-in now, actually - Apple raised the over-the-air download limit to 100 MB so we were able to embed it in the app and spare people the extra download. (also improves our standing with new users who don't realize it's an option, since it fills in a lot of gaps in PLC's vocabulary that were causing them to dismiss us as inferior to other CC-only apps)

No E-C in the free app, no - just frequency-sorted full-text English searches in Chinese-English dictionaries. You should indeed have some sort of E-C from a bundle - is the rest of the bundle active? Which bundle was it?

 

[markoshun]

No E-C in the free app, no - just frequency-sorted full-text English searches in Chinese-English dictionaries. You should indeed have some sort of E-C from a bundle - is the rest of the bundle active? Which bundle was it?

Sorry, can't recall for sure which bundle, but I do have ABC set as both e-c and c-e. I probably would have bought the Pro bundle. I was just starting out and so didn't really know what I was buying or what I needed. Did both bundles always include NWP?

Talking dict./ translators were upwards of $500 Canadian in Taiwan then and were not really great for learning Chinese. So I was thinking I was getting a great deal buying an iPod to run Pleco instead. Much better set-up (infinitely better! I didn't know the half of it) and cheaper.
Everything else seems to be working, ie. OCR etc. Plus handwriting and flashcards, etc. (there were no flashcards working that first winter. Had to wait till spring.)
What is Kai font? New? More fonts to practice with would be good. Will check those out too. (Any hope for a semi-cursive Trad?)

 

[mikelove]

No, we only added NWP to Pro very recently (modified license made that much cheaper to do).

Kai font can be selected as Pleco's systemwide font in Settings / Languages + Text or applied to a specific reader document by tapping on the gear icon. Will show up in other places soon, and certainly once we've gotten our font-related features fleshed out in a bit more detail we'd like to license a few more of them - seem to be quite popular so far. We've only been working with two foundries so far - Founder in Beijing and VMType in HK (which only makes XinGothic at the moment) - but there are many others out there we could reach out to that could offer us more traditional-friendly options; fonts that fully implement government-standard stroke order / lengths / etc in Taiwan and HK would probably do us a lot of good in terms of ingratiating ourselves with schools in those places.

 

[yoose]

How would you all compare the dictionaries? For C-E, what do they pay dictionaries bring that the free dictionaries do not? I can see the Tuttle provides some information that is unique to learning. the Pleco and CC dicts are quite good already, but I see that some of the paid ones (ABC, KEY, Oxford) contain a lot more entries and while I have downloaded the demos, its hard to tell if all those extra entries are useful. Is there value add for the paid dictionaries?

For E-C, I do find that the free ones are lacking sometimes. Any opinions on which of the pay ones (21st C, ABC, Oxford) are most useful? I see 21st Cen has 280k entries, 3-4x the other two, why the huge difference, are those entries useful?

Mike, will you be bringing back any bundles?

 

[Alexis]

Of all the paid C-E dictionaries, here's my favorites. (I'll mainly be commenting on the Pinyin oriented dictionaries since I am still relying on pinyin too much):

KEY: This was a bit of a gamble since the description made it hard to know what the advantage was, but I love the breadth of coverage and the conciseness of definitions. I have made it the first C-E dictionary on the list because it shows exactly what i need when using the reader or viewing the left-hand-side entry list.

TUTTLE: Second on my C-E list. Since it's a entry-level dictionary, any definitions/examples here are pretty much guaranteed to be high-usage.

ABC C-E: There are three main advantages over the PLC:
1) It it puts a * besides higher-frequency vocab. This helps me to decide how much effort to put into memorizing this word, or perhaps using a more common synonym instead.
2) It has pop-up parts-of-speech notes.
3) It gives the corresponding measure word in noun definitions.

Also, the more dictionaries you have, the more example sentences you'll get in the SENTS tab.

Mike, might i suggest a huge table listing all features of all dictionaries in the X column, then a list of dictionaries in the Y column, then check marking all that correspond? Might make it easier to know the differences between them.

 

[mikelove]

yoose - we've got the current two bundles and don't have any plans to introduce more right now; honestly, on iOS managing bundles is just too much of a hassle to expand our use of them. (people are constantly buying a single item in one of them and then demanding a credit / refund to buy a whole bundle, and that's painfully difficult to set up with Apple having the sole power to grant refunds)

Alexis - glad you're liking KEY, that was sort of a random addition (they actually contacted us about working together, which is unusual) but it deserves more attention than it generally gets. A feature table is a great idea - we're going to be improving our marketing copy in a lot of ways like this once we finish our current two priorities of a) the instruction manual and b) 3.0.1.

 

[sobriaebritas]

To the three advantages of the ABC C-E over the PLC mentioned by Alexis, I would add this one:

4) It lists verbs like 看得到，看不到 and 看起来 as separate entries. So if you, for example, make the following search @起来, you get a long list of verbs containing 起来 (please, see the first of the attached images attached).

But I do find a drawback in the ABC. As you can see in the second of the attached images, the entry for the character (in this case 性) includes compound words only in pinyin (highlighted in blue and underlined) which contain that character. When you tap on one of them, you are redirected to the full entry of the compound word in question. The problem is that in order to go back to your original search (i.e. 性), you have to tab first on the history button (the clock) and then on the said character. If those compound words were rendered in Chinese characters rather than in pinyin highlighted in blue and underlined, a single tab on them would bring you up a popup window with the word's entry; and you could go back with a single tab outside that popup window.
The printed edition of the ABC C-E only includes the pinyin too, for example: 性 ¹xìng* B.F. ①nature; character; disposition gèxìng, ¹xìngzi; on the other hand, its electronic version (I mean Wenlin) does include the characters: 性 ¹xìng* {B} b.f. ①nature; character; disposition 个性 gèxìng* 性子 ¹xìngzi*.

 

[mikelove]

That's no longer true in Pleco 3.0, not at all - tapping on any link will push you to a separate screen which you can then return to by tapping on a back button, even on an iPad.

Good note about characters in links, though - we could easily add those, we just hadn't been since we were trying to follow the ABC's whole Pinyin-first philosophy perhaps a bit too scrupulously.

 

[yoose]

Of all the paid C-E dictionaries, here's my favorites. (I'll mainly be commenting on the Pinyin oriented dictionaries since I am still relying on pinyin too much):

KEY: This was a bit of a gamble since the description made it hard to know what the advantage was, but I love the breadth of coverage and the conciseness of definitions. I have made it the first C-E dictionary on the list because it shows exactly what i need when using the reader or viewing the left-hand-side entry list.

TUTTLE: Second on my C-E list. Since it's a entry-level dictionary, any definitions/examples here are pretty much guaranteed to be high-usage.

ABC C-E: There are three main advantages over the PLC:
1) It it puts a * besides higher-frequency vocab. This helps me to decide how much effort to put into memorizing this word, or perhaps using a more common synonym instead.
2) It has pop-up parts-of-speech notes.
3) It gives the corresponding measure word in noun definitions.

Also, the more dictionaries you have, the more example sentences you'll get in the SENTS tab.

Mike, might i suggest a huge table listing all features of all dictionaries in the X column, then a list of dictionaries in the Y column, then check marking all that correspond? Might make it easier to know the differences between them.

thanks for the breakdown Alexis, it is quite useful. Key might be a bit too simple for me. Do you find it a disadvantage that Tuttle doesn’t have as many entries as some of the others like ABC? Have you run into many words that Tuttle does not have an entry for? Have you found any disadvantages for ABC? Thanks.

 

[Alexis]

Hi yoose. If i were to choose only one, it would be the C-E ABC. The only disadvantage is that not every entry has example sentences, but with the free PLC, and the sentence search in the SENTS tab, that's not a huge issue. It's very comprehensive.

If you can spend a bit extra, I'd also get the Tuttle. There are lots of words that are not on the Tuttle; It covers only high frequency words. For the words Tuttle does cover, it's very clear and useful, and, for words made up of more than one character, shows the meaning of the individual characters that make up the word.

 

[keffot]

I strongly recommend the Tuttle learners dictionary also. The practice/usage sentences are very very good. However despite it's 3000+ entries, I find that it's lacking. Even in my 2 year Chinese courses there's a lot of ones not covered, but well worth having still.

Because it doesn't fully cover I wanted to add another one and had the same question as you about the Oxford.

My friend who's a bit more advanced strongly recommends Xiandai, which is Chinese-Chinese but allegedly has very good example sentences. Thoughts anyone?

 

[Alexis]

I strongly recommend the Tuttle learners dictionary also. The practice/usage sentences are very very good. However despite it's 3000+ entries, I find that it's lacking. Even in my 2 year Chinese courses there's a lot of ones not covered, but well worth having still.

Because it doesn't fully cover I wanted to add another one and had the same question as you about the Oxford.

My friend who's a bit more advanced strongly recommends Xiandai, which is Chinese-Chinese but allegedly has very good example sentences. Thoughts anyone?

Note: When I refer to Oxford, I'm referring to the newly released one, not the pocket one.

I find that the Oxford has more sample sentences than the Xiandai, and also has english translations (no Pinyin).

I like the Xiandai for getting a more nuanced meaning of a word by reading it's chinese definition. Also has sample sentences, but not as many as the Oxford, and no English translations.

 

[yoose]

Hi yoose. If i were to choose only one, it would be the C-E ABC. The only disadvantage is that not every entry has example sentences, but with the free PLC, and the sentence search in the SENTS tab, that's not a huge issue. It's very comprehensive.

If you can spend a bit extra, I'd also get the Tuttle. There are lots of words that are not on the Tuttle; It covers only high frequency words. For the words Tuttle does cover, it's very clear and useful, and, for words made up of more than one character, shows the meaning of the individual characters that make up the word.

Note: When I refer to Oxford, I'm referring to the newly released one, not the pocket one.

I find that the Oxford has more sample sentences than the Xiandai, and also has english translations (no Pinyin).

I like the Xiandai for getting a more nuanced meaning of a word by reading it's chinese definition. Also has sample sentences, but not as many as the Oxford, and no English translations.

thanks alexis, how does the oxford compare to the ABC? I think at this point the breadth of the dictionary as well as examples are going to be most useful for me. One of the things that concerns me about Tuttle is the lack on entries. I am not at the point where I can use a C-C dictionary yet so XianDai is prob out for now.

 

[Alexis]

I find the ABCs definitions a bit more precise, and it includes pinyin for sample sentences.

Oxford seems to have have more sample sentences overall, but no pinyin.

Easiest way to make the choice: Buy all of them