Thanks Pleco

Animado

Member
I don't know who the people are that are behind this amazing dictionary, but I wouldn't be doing anywhere near as well in my Chinese as I am without it. So Thanks!
 

Shadowdh

状元
mikelove said:
You're welcome! Glad to hear you're finding it useful.


Useful??? I should say indispensable... the other day one of my classmates could not find what he wanted on his medium priced bubugao type dictionary but Pleco came up with the goods with no problem... its fair to say that Pleco is the best bar none...
 

sfrrr

状元
I concur. I don't understand how any English-speaking foreigner can study Chinese without PD.

Sandra
 

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
Thanks! Though most of the thanks on the dictionary-finding-unknown-words front are due to the hardworking people at the ABC project rather than Pleco.
 

daniu

榜眼
sfrrr said:
I concur. I don't understand how any English-speaking foreigner can study Chinese without PD.

no need to be english speaking :) I think there is nobody who is learning chinese without profound english knowledge anyways - so PD is the best choice for most people - for Germans even more since there is HanDeDict and DeHanDict. Not saying at all that it would not make it even more usefull and marketing in Germany easier if there was a commercial German-Chinese-Dictionary!

best regards
Daniel
 

sfrrr

状元
Daniel--I thought that, somehow, learning a language, e.g. Chinese, would be different depending on your native language. I.e. if your first language was German, then you're approach would be different from mine and you'd find different elements of Chinese difficult. I wonder if anyone has done a study of this vis a vis studying Chinese.

Sandra
 

daniu

榜眼
Hi!

I understand what you mean ... I think however that "we" westerners have a quite similar way of thinking. More similar than Western compared to Asian thinking ...

But there is one thing I found out about this:
We European non-english speakers are used to the fact that latin letter's pronounciation is different in different languages. Most Germans would be able to read french, italian, spanish texts - just read, not understand. Definitely not being able to read it correct but we have a rough idea about how letters change.
It seems to me that Americans have more difficulties with that concept. That is one reason why I found lots of Americans in Taiwan who appreciate bopomofo - since it is a completely different way of writing. We Germans would definitely prefer pinyin cause it is quite close to German and we do not have difficulties in learning another way of reading the same letters. Of course people more in touch with China do not feel like that since they do not have the option ... and since nobody tells them that bopomofo is way better...

Another reason why people learning Chinese in Taiwan prefer bopomofo is:
In Taiwan there are lots of street signs and other public things that use other ways of writing chinese than pinyin cause the officials try to write the way that an english-speaker would read it his way and the chinese would be able to guess what it means. The problem is that these systems do not have a standard. That means - speaking in pinyin: z, c, ts can not be distinguished in the way it is written in Taiwan. Because of that wrong spelling Americans who try to study chinese in Taiwan believe that Pinyin is not correct because they think the public transcription in Taiwan is Pinyin.

And - of course: in Taiwan locals do only know bopomofo, in China they only know pinyin ...

BTW: wasn't PD2 supposed to support bopomofo?

regards
Daniel
 

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
PD2 does support bopomofo/zhuyin; it's the main reason we added a keyboard to the input options, in fact. (that, and allowing people to put a keyboard on the side of the screen in landscape orientation on Windows Mobile instead of using Microsoft's stupid bottom-only one) You can enable it with the "Mandarin Pronunciation" option in the Display section of Preferences, though at present it only works in the C-E dictionaries since we haven't gotten around to re-coding all of the E-C ones to use our multi-format pronunciation system yet.
 

daniu

榜眼
Hi!

Grerat feature!

hmmm ... but then I have a feature request: I would like to learn bopomofo but not the hard way. So - it would be great to be able to see both - PinYin and bopomofo ...
Do you think it is possible? People in Taiwan will appreciate that cause I heard that chinese schools in Taiwan now more and more also use PinYin while locals only know bopomofo - at least those older than, maybe 15? Maybe there would also be another way of quickly changing pinyin to bopomofo. The preferences thing is too far to go when you are on the street talking to someone.

best regards
Daniel
 

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
Should theoretically be possible, the necessary coding is all there, but we're really not adding any new features to 2.0 at this point so it'll have to wait for another release. I imagine most of the people who can read bopomofo but not Pinyin can also read characters, though, so I don't know if having bopomofo would make much of a difference in that specific scenario.
 

collins

Member
thanks Pleco for making my Chinese study in China bearable....you guys are an amazing team.
All the Best as you reign as the best App ever!
 
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