Standard Dictionary of Modern Chinese

[caesartg]

The addition of a Chinese-Chinese dictionary is certainly welcome news and I'll probably be one of the first to buy it, assuming the price is right! Just a couple of quick questions concerning it:

- What do you reckon the price might be around? Any ballpark/footy field figure?

- One thing I was really hoping for from such a dictionary was a synonym/antonym element, similar to a Chinese-Chinese thesaurus, but browsing through the dictionary's website, I don't think it has this. Any plans to include such a resource like this at a later date? It's something that, as a 2rd year college/uni student, I'm really starting to need, not only to more easily expand my vocabulary but because we're examined on our dai4ti4 ability on the course! Maybe there's even a public domain resource somewhere??? Failing it being included, I'll just have to go back to paper on that one (if so, can you recommend any good Ch-Ch paper thesauri? I will be in HK/TW this summer)

I've got a couple of separate issues that I will also post about but keep up the great work!

Cheers

Ben Caesar

 

[mikelove]

I can't get into a lot of details on the pricing, because the last time we did that (pre-announcing pricing for PlecoDict 1.0) it turned out to be one of the single worst business decisions I ever made. It won't be too out of line with the other titles we offer, but it'll be on the high end of our current price range.

And the Standard Dictionary doesn't offer a synonym element per se, but as in most Chinese-Chinese dictionaries a lot of the definitions are given as two-character words with similar meanings, so if you look up a given word in it you'll probably find at least one more way to express the same idea. I agree that a more full-fledged synonym/antonym dictionary would be a nice idea, but I think it would be best to see how sales for this dictionary go before we launch headlong into licensing a bunch of additional Chinese-Chinese titles. I don't really have any good recommendations for free or printed synonym dictionaries, but you might try posting about this on http://www.chinese-forums.com - there are lots of people there who know more about this than I do.