Pleco for Cantonese?

Hi all I'm interested in using Pleco for learning Cantonese but I have some questions before I decide to buy the required add-ons

1) Is Pleco a good choice for Cantonese or am I better off with something like ((removed))?

2) What add-ons should I get? I already have words.hk installed is that enough or do I need to purchase something like ABC cantonese

3) Assuming I have the right add-ons installed, will Pleco contain all cantonese-specific words, slang/colloquial terms etc? Are the example sentences "proper" Cantonese as spoken by the natives or are they simply translated from Mandarin word for word?

4) If I purchase the flashcard system will I be able to use it exclusively in Cantonese? Also is there a way for the audio to automatically play when showing the answer?

Thanks
 
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mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
1) Obviously we think our app is great for Cantonese, but you'd have to consult a neutral Cantonese-related discussion forum to get an unbiased perspective on that :)

2) Between that and our free CC-Canto dictionary you should be pretty well covered, but you can download the demo version of ABC Cantonese and browse some entries if you'd like to see if that provides enough additional information to be worth the money.

3) Should cover most of them but no dictionary can guarantee it's 100%. As far as examples, the only two Chinese-English dictionaries in Pleco that provide Cantonese examples are words.hk and ABC Cantonese; other dictionaries like PLC or Oxford or the regular ABC Chinese-English just provide Mandarin examples.

4) Yes, the paid flashcard system can be configured to only display Cantonese, and there's an option to 'auto-play audio on reveal' that would give you Cantonese audio when showing an answer.
 
Thanks that was very helpful. Pleco seems pretty great so far but I'm having some trouble searching for some words using the handwriting function. For example sik6 je5 (to eat stuff). Sik6 shows up when I write it but je5 doesn't, although it shows up if I search je5 so it's clearly in the dictionary. Am I doing something wrong?

Also I can't find the option for auto-play on reveal is it a paid function only? I'm on android, thanks
 

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
Check Settings / Handwriting input - are all of the "Recognize ..." options turned on?

If so and it's still not coming up, it might be a character that's only supported with our paid 'enhanced' handwriting recognizer - you can test that out in its detail screen in "Add-ons."

Auto-play on reveal is also a paid feature. (in "Test Settings")
 

yee

举人
Pleco is not suitable for Cantonese. Cantonese is largely a spoken dialect. I am using pleco for this purpose mainly since I learned written Chinese as an overseas Chinese where Cantonese was the pronunciation of choice (Chinese population predates the choice of national dialect) and my native dialect is Cantonese.

This is a relatively unusual use case.
 
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