English-Chinese user dictionary?

[sam]

I'm a new user so I may have missed this somewhere.

I've found the user dictionary quite useful for entering new words that I need to know that aren't in the existing dictionaries i downloaded (professional edition plus ADS and LDC). BUT - I can enter them to search the chinese but I can't work out how to create user dictionary entries I can search by english.

ie. Is it possible to enter a word I want to be able to search by the english and not the chinese?

 

[minnes]

up at the top, (at least in the oxford, I am sure it is the same with the others) there is a button that says 中 if you push it, it goes to 英， which is english to chinese dictionary.

 

[minnes]

sorry, I just read that over, and relized that you were talking about adding entries, so to tell you the truth, I am not sure.

 

[mikelove]

I'm afraid that you can currently only add Chinese-English entries; the way we designed the custom database system made it very difficult for us to cover English-Chinese, and since we didn't think very many people would use it anyway we decided we could leave it out and only allow Chinese-English entries.

However, Pleco 2.0 will be using a brand new database system that should have no problem dealing with English-Chinese entries, so hopefully this ability will be added in that release. And in the meantime, you can create an English-Chinese database from a premade wordlist using our MakePlecoDictsoftware.

 

[hairyleprechaun]

I have a question regarding the following comment:

And in the meantime, you can create an English-Chinese database from a premade wordlist using our MakePlecoDict software.

I have been putting together an English-Chinese database, but I cannot figure out how to get pinyin to show up with tonemarks, instead of the numbers following each pinyin pronunciation, when I convert and import the database to Plecodict.

Here is an example of an entry:

cell phone 手机 shou3ji1

How can I get the pinyin shou3ji1 to show up in plecodict with tonemarks above the proper letters, instead of having the numbers for the tonemarks listed at the end of each pinyin, in this English-Chinese database?

 

[AJ]

How can I get the pinyin shou3ji1 to show up in plecodict with tonemarks above the proper letters, instead of having the numbers for the tonemarks listed at the end of each pinyin, in this English-Chinese database?

In my understanding and experience this cannot be done in the way you have your entry formatted using the current MakePlecoDict. The MakePlecoDict utility only translates the numbers to tone marks in the second field of the input file in the Chinese > English dictionary output.

I believe you can in your entry put in the tone marks yourself in the English to Chinese input file and they will be retained in the resulting output file / dictionary. I have done this for subsequent words in pinyin in the Chinese to English input files but not actually tried it in an English to Chinese input file.

I am going out on a limb here because it seems that the last couple of times I've tried to answer a question here, I've done so incorrectly. So take this with a grain of salt.

 

[mikelove]

AJ is quite correct - the tone numbers are only translated automatically if they're in the Pinyin section of the entry. There's a nice tone-numbers-to-tone-marks converter at pinyin.info - make sure to disable HTML coding and choose the "individually coded characters only" output style, as our font system does not currently support combining diacritical marks.

 

[hairyleprechaun]

Thanks for the help.