Which dictionaries have most/best example sentences?

[markv]

The title pretty much covers it. I want to buy one of the dictionaries (Chinese->English) for Pleco.

Since I'm nowhere near native level any time soon, I think all of them have all the words I need. So I'm looking for which ones have the best/most example usages (especially for medium difficulty words).

Personally I'm interested in spending at most 25$, and in learning only simplified characters, but I'll include all options for future readers.

(This isn't specific to Android, but I can't find a better subforum.)

 

[giokve]

Longman Advanced is Chinese-Chinese, and KEY has no example sentences, so you might want to remove them from your list.

All the other dictionaries you listed can work both in simplified and traditional charaters.

21th century has plenty of example sentences, but it's (broken or weird) English to Chinese only.

If you are a beginner (I assume you are), Tuttle is good but very limited; it has less than 4000 entries but plenty of example sentences. It might be a good dictionary to use in the beginning of your learning journey.

PLC and CC (and maybe Tuttle) are the only Chinese-English dictionaries your might ever need. Later in your journey I would spend my money on Chinese-Chinese dictionaries like 規範 (GF-guifan) and, if down the road you decide you want to learn traditional characters, download the excellent Chinese-Chinese dictionary 兩岸詞典 (LA) and maybe MOEDict. Maybe by that time LA will be distributed through Pleco like MOE is now. GF and LA have great example sentences. They also make Longman Advanced quite useless, so much so that decided to remove it from my Pleco (I do regret having bought it).

 

[markv]

Hmm seems I can't remove options...

Yeah, maybe I'm beginner-intermediate if optimistic. I don't have plans beyond the level of HSK4-5, which is going to take a bunch of years as it is. So that's the level of dictionary I guess I need.

So it would be a viable option to use the default dictionaries until I can switch to Chinese-Chinese (as soon as possible)?

 

[giokve]

I'll let someone else answer this since I'm not very familiar with the HSK levels. I would give Tuttle a try though.

I would also download Moedict right now, since it's free, and place it at the bottom of your dictionary list, and have a quick look at it from time to time without stressing too much about it -- if you can find a simple/short definition or example sentence that you can read without too much effort (not the ones in blue, since they are from literary texts and probably too difficult), great, if you can't, whatever, just skip it. It's just a nice thing to have around.

You can also try Moedict and see if it suits your need here.

 

[mikelove]

Oxford has quite a lot of examples too, actually, and since it's both English-Chinese and Chinese-English you're getting a lot of dictionary for the money with it in general. Tuttle has fewer examples / words and is C-E only but is good and basic and beginner-friendly - nice easy vocab in those examples. ABC is excellent as well, and its parts-of-speech are second-to-none, but it has fewer examples than Oxford, so if examples are your priority then Oxford might be a better bet.

21st Century sometimes has awkward English but the Chinese in the examples is fine so it's just a question of how much tolerance you have for occasional grammatical weirdness - certainly a massive amount of content there and a great resource for tricky things like proper nouns that aren't well covered by other dictionaries.

 

[alex_hk90]

Yeah, maybe I'm beginner-intermediate if optimistic. I don't have plans beyond the level of HSK4-5, which is going to take a bunch of years as it is. So that's the level of dictionary I guess I need.

So it would be a viable option to use the default dictionaries until I can switch to Chinese-Chinese (as soon as possible)?

I'll let someone else answer this since I'm not very familiar with the HSK levels. I would give Tuttle a try though.

I'm at around HSK4 level and tend to find the Chinese-Chinese dictionaries a bit challenging, so still use the Chinese-English ones mostly.

If you are at beginner-intermediate level then Tuttle would probably be your best bet.

 

[markv]

Thanks for the answers!

(Pity Oxford's examples don't have Pinyin, though they're still usable)