Synonyms & antonyms

[kasim]

Hello everyone,

I am currently exploring additional resources and I'm particularly interested in dictionaries that offer extensive lists of synonyms and antonyms. Does anyone have recommendations for dictionaries that can be imported to Pleco? Any suggestions or insights would be greatly appreciated!

Thank you in advance for your help!

Best regards,

 

[Shun]

Hello kasim,

I also think that's a worthwhile thing to do. I once tried to create a semantic tree of Chinese vocabulary, but then left it for a later day because my feeling for the gradations in meaning and different usages of many Chinese words was still insufficient. There seem to be a large number of sites with 同义词 and 反义词 when you google for them, though from what I've seen, their quality is variable, the search results are spartan, and they often come up with very wide-ranging synonyms which have hardly anything to do with your search terms.

One high-quality work that @sobriaebritas had recommended to me on the forums, «The Chinese Lexicon» by Yip Po-Ching (who also wrote a detailed and systematic Chinese grammar in English), isn't exactly a book on synonyms or semantic relationships between words, but more on their inner structure and formation, which can also be very useful if your goal is to extend your vocabulary. Here is the book's cover:

The question with this book is, while you can easily read in it and remember interesting facts, you should also be able to package the information in flashcards. Perhaps whenever you come across something you consider memorable, you make a flashcard from its examples.

Amazon has excerpts of it:

https://www.amazon.com/Chinese-Lexicon-Comprehensive-Survey-ebook/dp/B09QNS8S94/

Another, possibly more accessible resource is «A Thematic Dictionary of Contemporary Chinese» (2019, Routledge), which is geared towards intermediate to advanced learners and groups about 9,000 vocabulary items, with explanations on each, in 300 thematic categories, with some exercises.

https://www.amazon.com/Thematic-Dictionary-Contemporary-Chinese-ebook/dp/B07BWPH55B/

Kind regards,

Shun


PS: The following book is also quite useful, it points out the differences in usage between words similar in meaning and gives example sentences, but it's repetitive and does not offer a conceptual framework:

 

[catusf]

Try ChatGPT. I think AI need this kind of knowledge to understand the world documents

 

[Shun]

Nice! I've now tried it on the free ChatGPT 4o—it gives correct answers, albeit rather general ones. A specific GPT that knows even more about the Chinese language is surely forthcoming.

 

[catusf]

This custom GPT is pretty good Thesaurus

 

[Shun]

Hi catusf,

Impressive! This GPT has clearly collected much larger amounts of language data. It even translates from English or German and then gives synonyms in Chinese, and it explains differences in meaning better, in any language you desire. The example sentences are good, too. Thank you, such a useful resource. It feels more and more like asking a knowledgeable language tutor.

Shun

 

[catusf]

Yes, pretty impressive.

By the way, recently, Bydance released their ChatGPT competitor called DaoBao 豆包 https://www.doubao.com/ and it's impressive too, especially the English and Chinese pronunciations.

My Chinese is not good enough to confirm the output Chinese text, but the English version is pretty decent.

You may want to check it out.

 

[Shun]

Thank you! I feel that one is even better for Chinese. I simply asked it "“组织”的同义词“ (no login was needed), and got some rather varied, convincing explanations.

I hope that AI will soon be able to emulate human-like personalities and integrate them with its already existing rational intelligence, leading to a more interesting, soulful conversation. From that point on, humans will surely use GPTs to learn about new topics from A to Z, completely replacing teachers for basic studying by a more patient, highly available system, and perhaps also for new, intelligent types of games, starting with better text-based adventure games than 40 years ago. This sort of a system probably can't be trained just by scouring the web for language like they already are, but they'll probably find a way to feed the GPT the necessary data.

On the hardware side, I've heard in an interview with a TSMC SVP that OpenAI used "a trillion variables" to train ChatGPT 4. He also said they should have the 2 nm and 16A (Angström) process nodes ready in the next 2-3 years, each offering a 30% performance boost, and they will probably also improve the efficiency of larger, specialized neural engines by a wide margin.