Dictionary Requests

[RobRedbeard]

Mike,

Thanks again for your excellent work on this software and in getting licenses to the dictionary entries that you have so far.

I've been studying Chinese for a couple years and I find that I most often use the following dictionaries. As I migrate towards using Pleco for more of my study needs, I'd like to be able to bring these with me.

中华成语辞典 - I'm very surprised that there is no chengyu dictionary in the Pleco collection, and this is a major fault. I really hope you can get a license this one (shouldn't be difficult, the electronic version is ubiquitous in Chinese electronic dictionaries).
现代汉语辞典 双语版 - guifan is good and all, but there is an English/Chinese dual language version with full pinyin pronunciation for the word, so it shouldn't be necessary to choose between the accuracy of the Xiandai Hanyu dictionary and having English entries. Especially since it contains many of the common chengyu with both English and Chinese explanations.
汉英大辞典 - only pinyin for head words, but includes grammar information that key into classes at the upper-intermediate level.
新华字典 - as a zidian it only has single characters, but has a very extensive list of their meanings, as well as full pinyin and character examples of each meaning. This is a small book, but very useful.

I really hope we can get licenses to these available. Until then, my briefcase is going to have two touch screen dictionaries. I'd really like to lighten my load! Thanks for your hard work, and since I'm in China I'd be more than happy to do anything I can to help you. I can definitely find out who publishes these.

Rob

 

[mikelove]

On a 成语辞典, people keep asking for one of these but I honestly still don't quite understand why - the ABC dictionary includes an enormous number of chengyu entries, if there's a chengyu you don't understand you can pretty much always find a definition for it in there. Is there some extra benefit to a dedicated Chengyu dictionary that I'm missing? Given the lackluster sales for GFCD so far, though, if we did add a chengyu dictionary it would probably be a Chinese-to-English one.

Personally I don't think 现代汉语辞典 is as good a dictionary as 现代汉语规范词典, but it's a moot point anyway since we've had no luck whatsoever with that particular publisher. We've actually tried licensing a couple of other dictionaries along these lines too (like BLCU's excellent 双解词典) but no luck so far.

汉英大辞典 I'd personally love to have on my phone for reference purposes, though again I'm not sure if the market is out there for another Chinese-Chinese title - might be worth a shot, though, and perhaps in this economy we could swing a more favorable deal for it than we might otherwise. 辞海 is another title along those lines that we could take a look at, though 汉英大辞典 seems to have a bit more of an OED-ish air of authority about it among scholars at least.

 

[hairyleprechaun]

I am starting to drool Mike . . . ! Ha ha ha!

I would add them all in a heart beat if you can get them. Of course, you already know that.

As for the chengyu dictionary, since I also brought up the same topic sometime in the past, the reason I want a dedicated chengyu dictionary is for the ability to easily scroll through chengyu entries to learn new chengyu through browsing (as opposed to looking up a chengyu I have already heard about/seen somewhere, which is as you say, easy enough to do in the ABC). Yes, I know that a person can fool around with wildcard searches to make the ABC search for strings that are potentially chengyu, but it just isn't the same as being able to browse through the entries of a dedicated chengyu dictionary.

 

[RobRedbeard]

I'll see what I can find out about licensing the Xiandai dual language version. I know you've been trying, but I've got a couple friends in 步步高 and 好记星, maybe I can find out how they both licensed it. I think Casio did too, but I'm not positive about that. My wife stole my 3600.

I'm currently a little busy working with 汉王 to get some things fixed with their HD handwriting input on English models. I might go up there this weekend to help them debug, after that, I'll see what I can find out.

汉英大辞典 comes in a 双语 version. That's the one that is currently on my other electronic dictionary. It's Chinese to Chinese/English, so this could provide some support to those who still want English in their dictionaries.

As for lackluster sales of Guifan. I bought it. 8） It's excellent. If you aren't reading definitions IN the same language, you are not past the intermediate stage. I guess the sales just show how few people do that. Maybe your dictionary can help though! The cards are excellent, and I love the ideas of listing to the sounds then having to handwrite the words in quizes. That's a zinger of an idea, and you've got all the pieces already there.

Rob

 

[mikelove]

OK, always interested to get ideas on that. If anybody mentions anything about the 新时代汉英大词典 that's another one we've been trying for years to get at.

Interesting that you're working with Hanwang - as you know they're a big partner of ours. If any questions that come up that I might be able to help with let me know - we've already implemented handwriting capture with their library (but our own UI) on English-language devices, and we've got an NDA with them so we can easily share information about this sort of thing.

Guifan I think will get a lot more useful after a couple of software revisions - there's a nice little improvement already implemented on iPhone that makes it far easier for intermediate speakers to use, and there are some things in the works for 2.1 (like showing multiple dictionaries' definitions inline with each other) that should make it easier still.

 

[johnh113]

On a 成语辞典, people keep asking for one of these but I honestly still don't quite understand why - the ABC dictionary includes an enormous number of chengyu entries, if there's a chengyu you don't understand you can pretty much always find a definition for it in there. Is there some extra benefit to a dedicated Chengyu dictionary that I'm missing? Given the lackluster sales for GFCD so far, though, if we did add a chengyu dictionary it would probably be a Chinese-to-English one.

Dear Mike,

The reason I'd like a chengyu dictionary is that I am frustrated by the way ABC translates the chengyu. They only give the figurative translation, never a literal translation. Therefore I have to figure out what each character means and how the characters are grouped, which isn't always obvious. For instance, 塞翁丢马 is translated as "blessing in disguise." I look at the characters and wonder which characters mean blessing and which mean disguise. Well, of course, none of the characters mean anything like that. It's more like Mr. 塞翁 has lost his horse (and it eventually comes back with a second horse if I remember the story right). ABC doesn't explain any of that. Also, if the chengyu is two 4 character phrases put together it almost never has both phrases together.

So, while I appreciate ABC, it would be nice to have better chengyu explanations.

John

 

[gato]

The reason I'd like a chengyu dictionary is that I am frustrated by the way ABC translates the chengyu. They only give the figurative translation, never a literal translation. Therefore I have to figure out what each character means and how the characters are grouped, which isn't always obvious. For instance, 塞翁丢马 is translated as "blessing in disguise." I look at the characters and wonder which characters mean blessing and which mean disguise. Well, of course, none of the characters mean anything like that. It's more like Mr. 塞翁 has lost his horse (and it eventually comes back with a second horse if I remember the story right). ABC doesn't explain any of that. Also, if the chengyu is two 4 character phrases put together it almost never has both phrases together.

Many of the idioms are defined in more detail in the Chinese-only Guifan dictionary. The definition for 塞翁失马 is very close to this definition you can find on the web:
http://www.hudong.com/wiki/%E5%A1%9E%E7 ... 0%EF%BD%89)
《淮南子・人间训》中说：住在边塞的一个老人，家里的马跑到胡人那边去了，别人觉得可惜，老人却说丢了马不一定不是福呀!果然几个月后，那马带着胡人的骏马一起回来了。后用“塞翁失马”比喻受到损失不一定是坏事，也许会变成好事。

Is that more useful to you? If the Chinese-only definition is too difficult, then you might be out of luck as I'm not sure if there is a bilingual dictionary that gives the level of detail you are looking for.

 

[s85]

I'm using Guifan every day now, that's a great tool for learning + it has definitions for single characters.
It would be great to have:

• 
  more examples,
  a sentence database or something contaning examples,
  a standalone tool for making pleco-compatible dictionaries. Just to save time and effort.

 

[mikelove]

johnh113 - makes sense. Actually 塞翁失马 has a considerably longer definition in one of the Super Secret Dictionaries We Haven't Announced Yet, and as gato notes it's also in Guifan, though a dedicated C-E Chengyu dictionary would be better still.

s85 - we're thinking about some sort of dedicated example sentence search / database feature for 2.1 or 3.0, actually - certainly a lot more we can do to support sentences in there and in flashcards. A standalone user dictionary converter may happen eventually, but when it does we'd really like to make it open-source (big part of the benefit to using SQLite for user dictionaries is that we can do that), and before opening it up like that the user dictionary format needs to go through a couple more revisions - right now we're really not satisfied with its performance for some search types.

 

[s85]

mikelove
Making even the simplest converter can make your product more popular. I work as a translator. My job involves using quite specific vocabulary (1000+ items), available as wordlists (generated automatically from TRADOS translation memory etc) within a limited time period. It would be really great to be able to add these definitions to the main database as a single file (even using the file format is similar to CEDICT's) and remove once I don't need them. I think that CSV or CEDICT format may work well just because they're easy to understand and convert.

Pleco's search function is really great. The problem is that "standard" vocabulary is not enough.

 

[mikelove]

There's already the "Import" function in Manage Dicts - just put a text file full of entries on your handheld in the standard Pleco chars<tab>pinyin>tab>defn format and it should import pretty seamlessly into your existing user dictionary or a newly-created one. So this is really just a matter of providing a slightly faster, desktop-based way to do that - something we're happy to do, but we'd rather wait until the user dictionary format is a bit more stable / finalized first; we're going to add at least another index table or two (people with user dictionaries needn't worry, the software can add them automatically to existing databases) for performance reasons and it'd be best not to wait until all of that stuff's worked out before we release a desktop converter.

 

[RobRedbeard]

汉语成语用法词典

Mike,

This might be a good 成语 dictionary. It's meant for English speakers who are learning Chinese. It also will go over some of the finer points of both literal and figurative translation but in a format that's containable. It's about 69 元 cover price (~$10 US), so it shouldn't be unreasonably priced. It has Chinese English and some Pinyin, so I'm sure it'll be able to sell to a wider audience. Maybe ask them for a sample definition. I saw it after a friend bought a copy, but I haven't sat down and used it. In my quick look through though it looked quite helpful.

汉语成语用法词典
ISBN: 7-80052-237-7
Copyright 2000 Sinolingua
24 Baiwanzhuang Road
Beijing 100037 China

Tel: +86-10-6832-6333 / +86-10-6899-9587

E-Mail: sinolingua@ihw.com.cn

Rob

 

[mikelove]

I'll take a look - Sinloingua's part of the same group that owns NWP so that seems like a potentially very obtainable license.