Sometimes, headwords don’t appear in example sentences

[Wan]

As in the title. This is not Android specific, but I didn’t know where else to put it.
I have noticed this a couple of times, but only have one example handy, and that’s from the ABE dictionary.

Look up “await” in ABE, and you’ll find 等待 as the only translation. The example sentence doesn’t use the word. It doesn’t bother me at all, I just thought it funny and wanted to know: is it a bug or a feature?

 

[mikelove]

Probably more in the category of a bug - sloppy editing, basically

 

[daal]

I'm finding this a bit too often in the NWP English-Chinese dictionary, my first dictionary purchase. My first random search for an example was "complain." The dictionary offers three words in the first definition (抱怨，诉苦and 叫屈）, and then shows an example sentence using none of them. My next search for "improve" also shows three Chinese words (改进，改善 and 更好地利用）, one of which is used in the first example sentence, another in the fourth, but the other two use different words, including one I am familiar with, 提高, which is not one of the headwords.

In contrast with the OP, I do find this somewhat bothersome, because the example sentences are not not helping me determine whether the headword is appropriate or not in the Chinese sentence I'm trying to write. I guess this is just my opinion (意见，看法 - neither of which appear in the example sentences) but I'm starting to wonder if I am misunderstanding the purpose of example sentences.

Any other dictionary recommendations for a lower-intermediate student?

 

[Peter]

I use the English-Chinese dictionaries just to find headwords, and then go to the respective Chinese-English entries and read the description and examples there.

In the beginning I also kept an English thesaurus handy to search Pleco for similar English words.

 

[mikelove]

NWP isn't great on this count, to be honest - if you'd like a refund on that dictionary so you buy a different one email support and we'll be happy to help.

In general though for a Chinese learner there probably isn't much point in having example sentences in an E-C dictionary - better to just make it easy to pull up examples from a C-E dictionary, at least assuming you have one for each major meaning of a word.

 

[daal]

Thanks for your kind offer! I suppose the problem also has to do with the fact that Chinese and English express related and similar concepts in quite different ways, so there is often not a good one-to-one match. Are E-C dictionaries mainly for Chinese people reading English, and less for English people trying to write Chinese?