Dictionary bundles - when?

[dagnai]

Hello,
you do write that:

We're not offering a "Complete Bundle" on Android because we're launching a bunch of new dictionaries in a few months and it wouldn't stay "Complete" for very long; however, we will be offering dictionary-only bundles then that will get you all of the dictionaries you're missing at a reduced price.

I am an owner of Professional Bundle, and since the term at uni will start - I'd like to buy more dictionaries. Question: do I need to buy them separately, or will you provide some kind of bundle/s as written above in quotation?

 

[mikelove]

I am an owner of Professional Bundle, and since the term at uni will start - I'd like to buy more dictionaries. Question: do I need to buy them separately, or will you provide some kind of bundle/s as written above in quotation?

We will when the dictionaries are ready, but it's taking us a while to get all of the data files finished. We'd rather not offer an official bundle of the dictionaries-that-aren't-in-Professional in the meantime, but if you'd like to buy them all anyway, PM or email us and we can arrange something for you. (however, before doing that I'd advise you to look into each dictionary to decide whether it's actually something you'd want - very few people would be interested in both the Tuttle and the Guifan dictionaries, for example, since they're aimed at people on opposite ends of the Chinese proficiency spectrum)

 

[MarcoD]

Hi Mike,

just as I am too curious a quick question about the new dictionaries: do they include a dictionary which explain the different parts of a Chinese character which somehow makes it easier to memorize? I think "Tuttle Learner's Chinese-English Dictionary" comes close to it, but it is not exactly what I am looking for.
Just as an example: 看 (kan) is explained as a hand over the eye (makes memorizing a lot easier). Will you have something like that as a dictionary or would I have to create my own flashcards? Any other option for that?

Thanks a lot
Marco

 

[mikelove]

Just as an example: 看 (kan) is explained as a hand over the eye (makes memorizing a lot easier). Will you have something like that as a dictionary or would I have to create my own flashcards? Any other option for that?

We've been trying for a while to license such a dictionary but we've had limited success and are now considering developing our own.

Aside from the limited number of titles out there with this data, a major part of the problem is that the biggest category of Chinese characters are what are known as phono-semantic compounds - a radical plus another component to indicate the sound. 青 for example got a whole bunch of radicals added to it to make up other characters (请清情晴精睛靖 etc); those characters don't really have anything to do with the standalone meaning of 青 "green", but at the time the characters were made up, they represented words that sounded similar to 青, so the extra radical was basically just an indicator of which one of those similar-sounding words the writer was referring to. Breakdowns of characters like these are not very useful for memorization, particularly given how many of them don't even share their pronunciations anymore.

Ideogrammatic compounds like 看 and 名 and 森 are actually much less common, though they're certainly easier to memorize when you do encounter them.

Anyway, this is a problem because it makes it next to impossible to design something that's simultaneously a memorization guide and an accurate reference; we could license a title like Matthews or Heisig that's designed for memorization and comes up with useful mnemonics even if they're not linguistically accurate, or we could try to compile / adapt something that gives the best linguistic guess about how a character was constructed even if it isn't very helpful in memorization, but we can't do both things in the same title.

In the meantime, the "Chars" tab in the dictionary attempts to give you meanings for individual components, though it's not perfect since we haven't linked every variant of each component to its original meaning yet. (we've improved this considerably in our current beta compared to earlier versions, though)