English-Chinese dictionary search

[Anonymous]

I downloaded the demo of PlecoDict for Palm and for the most part, everything is great. The one thing that doesn't seem to work is searching for words in the NWP dictionary. Every time I search for something, it says that the word is not found even though I searched for the third word in the dictionary (abacus) and I can see it in the word list on the right side of the screen. Is this a limitation of the demo version? Searching for Chinese words in the ABC dictionary works fine.

Thanks.

carl

 

[lmcjipo]

I downloaded the demo of PlecoDict for Palm and for the most part, everything is great. The one thing that doesn't seem to work is searching for words in the NWP dictionary. Every time I search for something, it says that the word is not found even though I searched for the third word in the dictionary (abacus) and I can see it in the word list on the right side of the screen. Is this a limitation of the demo version? Searching for Chinese words in the ABC dictionary works fine.

Thanks.

carl

I don't know if this is a limitation in the demo version since I didn't test for this word when I was evaluating PlecoDict before purchasing it.

I do know that the PlecoDict Complete Bundle that I purchased for the PalmOS doesn't have this limitation. It finds the word "abacus" when I set the dictionary on "NWP" and the language to "English". It basically responds with abacus n. X X suan4pan2: use(work) an ~ X X X da3 suan4pan2 where the X's represent the Chinese characters which I don't know how to type on my computer.

 

[mikelove]

That's odd - I believe this was supposed to be fixed in the 1.0.1 update. Anyway, this is indeed confined to the demo version, so you aren't likely to encounter the same problem in the paid software. If you'd like to be extra-careful, we should be able to fix this bug for real in the upcoming 1.0.3 update, so if you wait for that release you can verify that the bug is fixed before purchasing the software.

 

[lmcjipo]

I think that I've come across a somewhat similar problem with the purchased version (Complete Bundle) on the PalmOS.

I came across this issue while working on creating my flashcards based on the textbook, Integrated Chinese. When I type in Hanguo or Hanwen (for Korea & Korean language), it doesn't find this in any of the dictionaries unless I either leave a space between "Han" and "guo" or I specify the numerical tone marks explicitly. With something like "meiguo", it finds it without the tone marks in the various dictionaries that I have.

I've tried the "Hanguo test" with the following dictionaries:
ADS, ABC, CED, OX (doesn't have Hanguo)

 

[mikelove]

That's because it automatically looks for the longest possible Pinyin syllable match for a particular search query - it's interpreting "hanguo" as "hang uo" unless you specifically stop it after the "han"with a space, punctuation mark, or tone number. It's difficult to do this more intelligently because of the way Pinyin queries are processed (updating after each letter is entered), though if we can find a way to fix this in Pleco 2.0 we certainly will.