Dictionary Help

[Cortney]

I'm a student learning Chinese, I've taken about 2 years worth of college courses. I can understand spoken Chinese decently, however reading characters is a struggle still for me. However, I am traveling to China in about a month and a half, and will be there for a semester.

My question is, would I be okay with just the free dictionary? Or should I pay for an additional one? I am already looking at the Image reader (and the Basic Bundle), but as I am a student, I don't have very much money. I don't want to spend money on the Professional Bundle or additional dictionaries if I don't have to right now.

Thank you for any feedback or information in advance.

 

[alex_hk90]

I'm a student learning Chinese, I've taken about 2 years worth of college courses. I can understand spoken Chinese decently, however reading characters is a struggle still for me. However, I am traveling to China in about a month and a half, and will be there for a semester.

My question is, would I be okay with just the free dictionary? Or should I pay for an additional one? I am already looking at the Image reader (and the Basic Bundle), but as I am a student, I don't have very much money. I don't want to spend money on the Professional Bundle or additional dictionaries if I don't have to right now.

Thank you for any feedback or information in advance.

To be honest if you're a beginner in reading you can probably get by with the free dictionaries, but there might be one or two learner dictionaries that you could find useful (Tuttle maybe?).

 

[Cortney]

To be honest if you're a beginner in reading you can probably get by with the free dictionaries, but there might be one or two learner dictionaries that you could find useful (Tuttle maybe?).

So the free dictionaries should be able to help me with the characters I don't know while in China? Like the ones on signs or menus?

Tuttle? What is Tuttle?

 

[mikelove]

Sorry I haven't chimed in before now.

Free dictionaries should suffice for basic travel terms like that, yes. Tuttle is a learner's dictionary - only has a few thousand words, but it covers them in great detail with lots of explanations and example sentences.

In general, if you're a student learning characters I'd actually recommend mostly using handwriting rather than OCR to look up unknown characters - forces you to actually think about the structure of the character you're looking up, so you're much more likely to commit it to memory after a couple of lookups than you are with OCR.