Stroke order - does it have traditional too?

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pleco10

秀才
I am considering purchasing the Basic Bundle on Pleco for iPhone. But I have a few questions.

1) Does the stroke order cover BOTH traditional and simplified characters? (currently it seems there is no trial for this feature...)

2) I am interested in the flashcard list created by Ryan Kellogg here: http://www.plecoforums.com/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=1674
Can I import it in the Pleco app for iPhone?

3) Will there be Cantonese audio at any stage???? PLSSS!!!!! FREEEE FOR BASIC BUNDLE PURCHASERS PLS!!!!!!
(I did a search and did see some forum posts regarding the difficulty in implementing this... I was just adding a +1 to feature request...)
 
mikelove

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
1) Yes, it fully supports both (has about 40,000 characters in all, in fact).

2) Yes, that should work just fine with the iPhone version.

3) Only if we can license a Cantonese dictionary; Cantonese audio without a Cantonese dictionary is kind of a waste of time, since there are a lot of Cantonese-specific words and there's no easy way to map Mandarin syllables to Cantonese ones. (this is why a lot of the iPhone Chinese dictionaries that supposedly support Cantonese really don't) We've found one from CUHK that we can license, but it's very old and we'd have to finance the electronic conversion of it ourselves, so not sure whether or not that will actually happen anytime soon.
 
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pleco10

秀才
Thx for the quick response!

I just purchased Pleco Basic Bundle!!

I'm so happy about the stroke order support!!!!

Flashcards are awesome too - the save and resume function is cool!

(Pity about the Cantonese situation... )
 
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ConfuciusTse

举人
While we are on this top...how about Taiwanese? There is NOTHING on the market for learning Taiwanese from English. Then again, it's a bit of a niche. But +1 for Taiwanese for me anyway because I can always hope.
 
mikelove

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
Are there even any dictionaries out for that? Any current enough to actually be in print? That's the biggest reason why we don't much with dialect support now - there just isn't any material out there that we can license.
 
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pleco10

秀才
I'm unfamiliar with that dictionary... but any Canto dict would be great! (as a free addon for bundle purchasers please!!! :D)

From the Amazon site, a reviewer says "As the cover says, this dictionary is for travelers and beginners of Cantonese, so the focus is on daily and useful expressions."... BUT any Canto dict would be great!!! If possible it would be WONDERFUL to have that additional Cantonese dictionary!! This particular dict would be useful to me for revision and catch-up purposes! (I am somewhat fluent in Canto, but my main purpose is to learn more advanced vocabulary - having canto audio would be best, but I understand this is somewhat difficult to add. Parity with the Qingwen app would be nice - that app has canto audio via a web stream but not offline)
 
mikelove

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
Making a Cantonese dictionary a free add-on is very unlikely, sadly; with flashcards, we don't have to pay any per-copy royalties since we developed the system ourselves, so we didn't suddenly have to write a check to a publisher for thousands and thousands of copies' worth of royalties when we added them to everyone's bundle, but a Cantonese dictionary would almost certainly involve per-copy royalties and hence would have to be a paid upgrade - we simply can't afford to pay back-royalties for a Cantonese dictionary for everybody who's ever ordered a bundle from us. But hopefully it would be very cheap at least :) And we would almost certainly try to do corresponding audio recordings too.
 
W

WeiPhotoArts

Member
Re: Cantonese Dictionary

I, too, would like Pleco to offer a Cantonese Dictionary, with male/female voice.

This would cost a bit of money, since no one I know has it for the iPhone. So I'm in favor of offering it for a price, just like other dictionaries. I would not mind paying additionally for it, even though I will be shortly sign up for the BASIC Pleco package.

I responded to Mr. Sheik of CantoDict concerning porting his work to an app for the iPhone. He said he was working on it, but the required programming was quite different than what he was used to on the internet. The effort was not going well.

So three weeks I suggested he contact Pleco for a joint effort, using the Pleco engine and his dictionary. Both parties could benefit. That would only leave the voice offerings to do (CandoDict does not have every word in voice Cantonese--and besides, it's also more clunky to use). So far, no reply.... But I'm hoping something will come of this. There is a need for such an app.
 
mikelove

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
Based on our previous interaction I'm not optimistic about his being interested (I wrote him a few months ago about the same subject and didn't get a reply either), though certainly I'd be delighted to explore the possibility of working together if he was.

However, there are still a couple of licensable printed Cantonese dictionaries out there, so there's a good chance we may be able to release a Cantonese product on our own - these things tend to take a very long time to come together but that doesn't mean that they won't eventually do so. The audio part I'm not worried about - we could easily hire a couple of native Cantonese speakers to do recordings for us, we may not have the resources to commission an entire dictionary ourselves but audio recordings are a different story.
 
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