Arieh
Member
I've been a huge, huge Pleco fan for years -- it's my constant companion with Chinese. I have almost all the English-Chinese and Chinese-Chinese dictionaries by this point, including several of the Cantonese ones, and it's pretty rare for me to stumble upon words or characters not covered by at least one of the dictionaries.
There's only one pretty common use case I have with Chinese, though, that Pleco doesn't quite do well for me, and that's phrase lookup. A lot of times I have a phrase in mind in English that I don't really know how best to express in Chinese or where I'm curious about alternative ways. Take as an example the pretty basic English phrase "more regularly." This is obviously not a dictionary entry nor does it appear in any of the Pleco example sentences.
What I would like to see is something like Microsoft's incredible (though sadly seemingly abandoned) Engkoo tool, which presents you with an infinite list of semantically structured English-Chinese sentences containing that phrase. Jukuu can do something similar though not as well, in my opinion. It seems bizarre to me that there is not a single iOS app out there that can duplicate this functionality really well (有道词典 comes closest) and certainly not offline.
So I don't know if it'd be possible for you guys to find a really good offline English-Chinese sentence database to license or integrate with Microsoft's Engkoo API for online searches (though I doubt they even have one), but I'd be willing to pay good money for something like this in app form, whether built into Pleco or as a separate app.
There's only one pretty common use case I have with Chinese, though, that Pleco doesn't quite do well for me, and that's phrase lookup. A lot of times I have a phrase in mind in English that I don't really know how best to express in Chinese or where I'm curious about alternative ways. Take as an example the pretty basic English phrase "more regularly." This is obviously not a dictionary entry nor does it appear in any of the Pleco example sentences.
What I would like to see is something like Microsoft's incredible (though sadly seemingly abandoned) Engkoo tool, which presents you with an infinite list of semantically structured English-Chinese sentences containing that phrase. Jukuu can do something similar though not as well, in my opinion. It seems bizarre to me that there is not a single iOS app out there that can duplicate this functionality really well (有道词典 comes closest) and certainly not offline.
So I don't know if it'd be possible for you guys to find a really good offline English-Chinese sentence database to license or integrate with Microsoft's Engkoo API for online searches (though I doubt they even have one), but I'd be willing to pay good money for something like this in app form, whether built into Pleco or as a separate app.
(doesn't seem to be anything with "more regularly" but "more frequently" does appear in Oxford e.g.)