Hard time searching for Cantonese words

karig

Member
Maybe (probably) i'm doing something wrong? Im trying to run pleco for cantonese only, i'm running on the "all cantonese dictionaries" group, including the purchaed add-on for ABY. I also have Yale romanization with accent marks set.

However when searching for what seems like should be fairly simple words such as "Meihgwok yahn" and "Jungmahn" it only finds words related to those, not the word itself (Such as "Jung mahn haih" or "Meih gwok gwai"). I'm quite new to the language, but both these are in the vocabulary taught on the first page of the book i'm using to learn (CANTONESE in communication: listening and speaking). Some words it finds without issue, but it is a bit disheartening that a substantial percentage of the basic words i'm being taught in the first chapter of the book i'm unable to find.

Is there something that i can do to fix this?
 

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
Hmm... what if you leave out the 'h'es? Or if you search using characters or Jyutping? This could be a Yale conversion bug of some sort - to be honest only a very small % of our Cantonese customers use Yale romanization and my sense is that most of those do so via a Yale keyboard rather than by keying it into our input box correctly.
 

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
I just did a quick double check here and 'jung mahn haih' and 'meihgwok yahn' both work OK even just with the free PLC + CCY dictionaries. Are you sure your Cantonese 'phonetic system' in Settings / Languages is on "Yale w/Marks" and not Jyutping or Sidney Lau? Could you maybe post a screenshot of one of those in the search box with no results found? (not suggesting that I don't believe you or anything, it'll just help eliminate a number of possible causes for this problem)
 

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
Ah, I see the problem now - did you turn off or disable our built-in PLC and CC dictionaries in some way? Turn those back on - neither ABY nor CCY covers vocabulary that Cantonese shares with Mandarin, they only cover words that are specific to Cantonese. (PLC and CC both include Cantonese readings, so they search / display in Cantonese just like entries from ABY and CCY)
 

karig

Member
ahhhhh yes that makes it work, sorry about that didn't realize that's how it worked, i figured to make it cantonese only work i should disable all the mandarin dictionaries, but it works great now it seems that i've enabled CC and PLC again :) thanks for your help.
 
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