How to choose a dictionary

simond

Member
I found this thread:

http://www.plecoforums.com/threads/whats-what-in-dictionary-land.3600/

And I basically have quite similar questions in terms of how to choose a dictionary. I'm at what I would consider an intermediate to upper-intermediate level in terms of my reading. I can make my way through C-C dictionary entries OK, but struggle with the classical quotes. I'm mostly studying simplified characters but can also read traditional.

I've downloaded all the sample entries from the paid dictionaries, but it's not very helpful to get a big list of characters beginning with 啊 or 阿 and makes it rather time-consuming to compare more common entries across dictionaries. What would really be useful would be comparison across a few carefully chosen words to show the strong / weak points of each dictionary.

For example, words that are missing in the free dictionaries but are actually not too uncommon. Or a word with lots of examples in one dictionary but not in another. Or a note on usage in one word

I am not too interested in the non-dictionary add-ons, and pinyin is not a priority for me except for clarification on difficult and rare readings. Mostly interested in simplified but accurate traditional characters is a bonus. At the moment I will mostly search on the internet for words where I can't get a good definition from Pleco, but if I can save time and get a more comprehensive or authoritative picture of the language then I would definitely consider paying for that.

I haven't used a paper dictionary since I was a beginner, and used to spend a lot of time on nciku after that, so not really sure what to look for in a dictionary or how much benefit it will be over the free dictionaries / online dictionaries I use now. With that said I find Pleco very convenient and well-designed, and would like to use it if I can. It's just a bit difficult at the moment to figure out what is the best thing to buy - both professional and beginner bundles come with the add-ons I'm not too interested in, and the thread I referred to basically said some dictionaries are good for X not for Y, some are good for X not for Y, not sure dictionary Z is better than the free dictionaries, etc.

So I guess what I'm looking for is the Pleco sales pitch - a little more detailed than the headlines you get when you look at the demos in the add-ons store, and a little more focused than the long list of words you get in the demos.

Related threads

http://www.chinese-forums.com/index...rth-paying-for-basicpro-add-on-bundles/page-1

http://www.chinese-forums.com/index.php?/topic/41599-why-is-pleco-so-popular/
 

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
That's a tricky question, honestly - we are working on dictionary comparison pages for our website (as part of a larger redesign) but we've been in a kind of a frantic programming spree the last two years (long-delayed iOS UI revamp, then porting that to Android, and right now trying to get our app updated to support iOS 8) and haven't been able to take the time to finish them.

Also, in general highlighting specific dictionaries' weak points is dicey for us since we don't want to piss off the publishers we license them from - we kind of have to act as cheerleaders for our entire product line. So even when these are available I don't necessarily know if they'll be able to provide a sufficiently critical / unbiased comparison to meet your needs.

I think a good place to start for your purposes might be with the Oxford Chinese Dictionary; it's up-to-date and fairly comprehensive, covers quite a lot of words that the free ones don't, greatly improves English-to-Chinese support over the built-in dictionaries, includes quite a lot of example sentences, has very accurate traditional support, and since it's not included in any bundle, you won't be losing out if you decide to buy a bundle later on.

If your focus is specifically on covering words that aren't in the built-in dictionaries, the KEY and ABC C-E dictionaries are our most comprehensive C-E ones and are updated pretty frequently with new words. KEY doesn't include any example sentences, though, and ABC doesn't include very many - far fewer than the built-in PLC dictionary, though the ones they do include are generally of very good quality.

Among C-C dictionaries, the Guifan Cidian is up-to-date but not that big, and the Hanyu Da Cidian is big but not very up-to-date.
 

gato

状元
Since you can read handle a C-C dictionary, I think Guifan is a must. The definitions in C-C dictonaries are much more nuanced than in C-E dictonaries. Guifan in many places also offers useful notes to help distinguish between synonyms. That's a feature no other Pleco dictionary offers at the moment, as far as I can remember.
 
Since you can read handle a C-C dictionary, I think Guifan is a must. The definitions in C-C dictonaries are much more nuanced than in C-E dictonaries. Guifan in many places also offers useful notes to help distinguish between synonyms. That's a feature no other Pleco dictionary offers at the moment, as far as I can remember.

Longmans has a lot of very specific synonym comparison notes too - which is also quite handy.
 

simond

Member
That's a tricky question, honestly - we are working on dictionary comparison pages for our website (as part of a larger redesign) but we've been in a kind of a frantic programming spree the last two years (long-delayed iOS UI revamp, then porting that to Android, and right now trying to get our app updated to support iOS 8) and haven't been able to take the time to finish them.

Also, in general highlighting specific dictionaries' weak points is dicey for us since we don't want to piss off the publishers we license them from - we kind of have to act as cheerleaders for our entire product line. So even when these are available I don't necessarily know if they'll be able to provide a sufficiently critical / unbiased comparison to meet your needs.

I think a good place to start for your purposes might be with the Oxford Chinese Dictionary; it's up-to-date and fairly comprehensive, covers quite a lot of words that the free ones don't, greatly improves English-to-Chinese support over the built-in dictionaries, includes quite a lot of example sentences, has very accurate traditional support, and since it's not included in any bundle, you won't be losing out if you decide to buy a bundle later on.

If your focus is specifically on covering words that aren't in the built-in dictionaries, the KEY and ABC C-E dictionaries are our most comprehensive C-E ones and are updated pretty frequently with new words. KEY doesn't include any example sentences, though, and ABC doesn't include very many - far fewer than the built-in PLC dictionary, though the ones they do include are generally of very good quality.

Among C-C dictionaries, the Guifan Cidian is up-to-date but not that big, and the Hanyu Da Cidian is big but not very up-to-date.

I'm not exactly sure what my focus would be at the moment. I do sometimes look up words and don't find them, but the built-in dictionaries are very good. I took a look at the Oxford Chinese Dictionary example items and compared to the the free dictionaries. There were perhaps a couple of extra words in the Oxford Chinese Dictionary not in the free ones, but not really enough to convince me just yet. For example OCD has 阿Q精神 , 阿盖尔郡, and 阿基米德原理 - Ah Q mentality, Argyllshire, and Archimedes' principle which are not in the free dictionaries - but 阿Q,阿盖尔,阿基米德 - Ah Q - with an explanation of the mentality, Argyll, and Archimedes all are. For many of the other words and characters in the sample, definitions and compounds were as good in the built-in and free dictionaries.

Based on your answer, I might wait a little bit for the dictionary comparison pages. At the moment for words I can't find in C-E dictionaries I generally go to 百度知道 or zdic.net. I looked at the example words in Longmans and found e.g. 一行, which has two meanings depending on whether 行 is pronounced xing or hang, the latter of which is not covered in the basic dictionaries. However, I wasn't exactly sure of the difference between these two based on the explanation in Longmans until I looked online and found http://zhidao.baidu.com/question/272981089.html, after which I could understand the examples given. Compare 汉语大词典, which has many examples for both - much more than Longmans, but I do struggle with the classical Chinese examples. It also appears to have the same examples as zdic.net, although zdic isn't as well formatted as Pleco (and has the disadvantage of being online only). It's a little difficult to browse 汉语大词典 sample entries as I'm not sure exactly how the are sorted - looks like stroke order then type of stroke? Perhaps standardising sort order in the samples would be a relatively easy way to improve them.

Unfortunately 规范 has a different set of example sentences, so it's difficult to compare with HYDCD and Longmans. However the examples are similar to Oxford - it seems similar in scope but having the explanations in Chinese gives them a little more context. For example Oxford just has a one word translation of 吖啶黄 as acriflavine, whereas 规范 explains what it is and what it's used for - helpful as I've never heard of acriflavine. Again this is probably not the most useful example word to be looking at, but I realise choosing good samples for the dictionaries is likely a difficult problem.

I'm still struggling a bit to compare the dictionaries as it takes quite a few taps back and forth to check how two words are defined in two different dictionaries even when the samples in both dictionaries cover both words. The sample entries do help, but just seeing a few side-to-side comparisons for different dictionaries could be really handy, especially if the words could be chosen to be a bit more representative of the variety of typical usage - they are not too bad but could be improved. The suggestions from gato / ACardiganAndAFrown's on C-C dictionaries are also welcome, it would be interesting to see one or two examples of the kind of usage / synonym notes in those dictionaries. They might be in the sample entries but I haven't check these thoroughly yet. Seeing examples of words in one dictionary but not another would be potentially more useful than just knowing the number of entries. I'm not sure if this would violate your criteria of not cheering for the whole product line, but would hope that in some cases a more focused list of entries might be useful to people (e.g. Adsotrans has perhaps wider coverage than a beginner might want).

Alternatively having a button to download entries from all available (or specific user-selected) dictionaries could be pretty useful - maybe this could be a limited to a certain number of uses and / or require a nominal payment redeemable against any purchases. This would give a much better idea of whether having additional dictionaries would actually help for the kind of words I'm looking up, and which ones would be most useful. Not sure if that's a realistic idea or not, but I feel like a kind of micropayments system redeemable against dictionaries could make the decision making process a lot easier.

Incidentally I don't really do much E-C translation at the moment as I'm trying to broaden my intake of Chinese material rather than actively working on production, although that might be something I consider a bit more in terms of what would be useful for me.

Based on all of this, as you might be able to tell I'm still a little bit undecided on what the best option for me is. I'm almost tempted to buy a few dictionaries just because I'm not really sure based on what I've seen so far, but nothing really stands out as a top choice. Maybe 规范 (or possibly Longman) will be the easiest way to get a new perspective. One thing I'm slightly concerned about is buying too many and then getting overwhelmed by definitions from ten different dictionaries. I think I read something about an effort to merge definitions from different dictionaries together in future, but can't find information on that right now.

Thanks for responses from all and I will continue to consider this. Any and all additional feedback is most welcome. Thanks.
 

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
We actually do merge definitions already in the definition screen - even with the free app you'll probably see quite a few entries for which results are available from both CC and PLC.

Better dictionary comparison features in the app are a good idea - at the very least we ought to offer a way to see from the main search screen whether or not a particular demo dictionary covers a particular word.

Honestly, much like the website, this is an area we've neglected of late on account of being insanely busy; it's really, really hard for us to keep adding new features at a decent pace while also supporting two different platforms and keeping up with the various new challenges thrown at us by those. While we're undoubtedly losing sales by not making it easier for compare / shop for dictionaries within the app, we're losing fewer sales that way than we would by letting our app's development stagnate or, worse yet, leaving it incompatible with a new version of iOS or Android. Making less money than we could from new customers confused by our quantity of dictionary offerings is better than losing them altogether to another app, or losing the referrals we get from keeping our existing users happy.
 

simond

Member
We actually do merge definitions already in the definition screen - even with the free app you'll probably see quite a few entries for which results are available from both CC and PLC.

Better dictionary comparison features in the app are a good idea - at the very least we ought to offer a way to see from the main search screen whether or not a particular demo dictionary covers a particular word.

Honestly, much like the website, this is an area we've neglected of late on account of being insanely busy; it's really, really hard for us to keep adding new features at a decent pace while also supporting two different platforms and keeping up with the various new challenges thrown at us by those. While we're undoubtedly losing sales by not making it easier for compare / shop for dictionaries within the app, we're losing fewer sales that way than we would by letting our app's development stagnate or, worse yet, leaving it incompatible with a new version of iOS or Android. Making less money than we could from new customers confused by our quantity of dictionary offerings is better than losing them altogether to another app, or losing the referrals we get from keeping our existing users happy.

Understood that this might not be a priority, and I wouldn't want to comment on whether this is worth working on for you. Part of why I suggested that having better dictionary comparisons as a paid for feature might be a good idea is that it gives you a better incentive to work on dictionary comparison, but I realise there's all sorts of complications to that idea.

Incidentally I found a thread where the "just buy all of them" option was taken... http://www.skritter.com/forum/topic?id=189353558 .
 
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