Upgrading Dictionary

[tonyblum1343]

Hi,

I'm thinking of upgrading and adding a new dictionary. One of the main reasons is that soon Pleco 2.0 will be coming out, and I find it incredulous that I'll be able to upgrade for free even though I bought Pleco so long ago. So I wouldn't mind giving some more of my money to support this great product.

Anyway, I bought Pleco about a year ago for a trip to China (and have returned multiple times since). I've been studying in my free time since. I bought Pleco Professional.

I probably don't need to buy anything else right now, but thinking of the upgrade to 2.0 has made me want to upgrade something now (yeah, I'm an idiot). So I'm considering adding the Oxford or maybe the cheng & tsui. The Oxford might be helpful since I'm still at a fairly low intermediate level (and that might be being optimistic), so I'm thinking it would probably provide extra example sentences to help me understand the meaning and usage when confused. The Cheng & Tsui I imagine would be less useful at this instance, but good when I get a little more advanced. I do occasionally attempt to talk about the stock market and such and am unable to find the correct words though. Might be more of a novelty purchase for me though.

Any suggestions? Or maybe I should wait for the new Chinese -> English dictionary coming out. Or slowly add them all. Though I'm interested in hearing if the Oxford dictionary would have much extra use for me on top of the ABC/NWP package.

Thanks,

Tony

 

[Alexis]

The Tuttle Learner's Dictionary (Chinese-English) is going to be released for 2.0. This dictionary word count is relatively small, but it covers all the HSK Level A & B vocabulary and additional terms useful to a beginner-intermediate (total of 4800 words). Every single entry has at least one example sentence.

I'm currently studying for the HSK and as soon as this dictionary comes out it's the one I'm buying and switching all my flashcards to. I like the entries in the Tuttle much more than the equivalent ones in the ABC/Oxford.

 

[mikelove]

Thanks! The generous-software-upgrades-but-expensive-dictionary-addons system has worked pretty well for us so far; saves us from having to keep actively supporting old versions of our software, which can be a big headache, plus some new features (full-text search, better flashcards, etc) serve as an excellent advertisement for why you should buy those add-ons.

Unfortunately, though, Tuttle actually might not be out until a month or two after 2.0 is ready; if we can find a way to do it without delaying the release any further we will, but at this point the top priority is to get 2.0 out with the 1.0 dictionaries plus GF/21, so Tuttle and Wiseman may be delayed a bit because of that.

There are quite a few errors with Pinyin in the Tuttle dictionary (in its original printed form and therefore in the source data files), and we're debating whether to hurry it out with those errors intact or take a little time and go back and try to correct some of them - since the NWP has less-than-perfect Pinyin too and we've gotten very few complaints about that I'm inclined towards the former, but if anybody considers the as-printed Tuttle completely unacceptable now would be a good time to speak up.

Another reason for the delay is that we're still trying to decide how exactly to fit Tuttle into the other dictionary bundles - including it in the Basic would make the soon-to-be-$70 price tag for that go down a bit easier, but then we'd also have to include it in the $10 Basic 2.0 upgrade (along with giving it for free to people who'd already bought said upgrade) in order to maintain our policy of not-punishing-people-for-buying-1.0-just-before-we-released-2.0.

 

[ipsi]

I would say it depends on how obvious those errors are. e.g. If they're quite subtle, I'd recommend fixing them, as it is a learners dictionary after all, and someone new to Chinese might not pick up on them.

I also think it's a better look in general for Pleco if you can say "Hey, we've got Tuttle, *without* the errors!" . It's a good reason for people who already have the printed form to get the Pleco version. Guess it depends on how much effort it would be. My vote would be for fixing it (if we're allowed to vote ).

 

[hairyleprechaun]

I'd have to agree for Ipsi's reasons and because I like things to be perfect

 

[Alexis]

I would be willing to wait longer for the Tuttle to be released if the Pinyin could be fixed up. The relatively large number of pinyin errors has been the the main disappointment I've had with this otherwise excellent resource.

 

[mikelove]

We'd certainly fix them eventually, it's just a question of whether or not we release an uncorrected version of the dictionary now and fix it later versus waiting until it's fixed to release it at all. In general I'm inclined to do the former, since the data conversion itself isn't very difficult and I imagine most people would rather have something than nothing, but ipsi's note about a learner getting incorrect info from it is worth considering - Alexis, do you encounter a lot of Pinyin errors in headwords or are they mostly in example sentences?

 

[tonyblum1343]

I ended up adding Oxford. As someone who has been studying Chinese for a year in my free time, I would definitely recommend getting the Complete Edition. It is always good to have more examples and explanations; has already come in handy.

As for the Tuttle question, I'm trying to think from the perspective of someone who doesn't speak Chinese very well. I can see both sides of the argument: something is better than nothing, but then again maybe not if beginner's will be learning incorrect information. Since these two concerns need to be balanced in coming to a decision, I think it would depend upon the number of errors and the nature of them (i.e., are they obvious mistakes, or ones that would tend to deceive beginners, etc.). At the least, since you plan on correcting the errors eventually, you could release it beforehand, but with a warning. That way people know what they are getting into.

Also, why is Pleco having to correct the errors in this dictionary? Shouldn't this be something that the publisher whom you are licensing it from done a long time ago? I guess you are licensing it as-is, with permission to correct mistakes.

 

[mikelove]

Well maybe we'd release it at first as just an add-on and then integrate it into a bundle later on once we'd gotten the bugs worked out - that way people wouldn't be buying it without researching it a bit first. (add-ons are going to be a lot easier to buy in 2.0, you can just check a box in the order form to tack them on to your order)

It's rare to find a Chinese dictionary that doesn't have a lot of errors, and the Tuttle's both a first edition and has a lot of example sentences so that only makes things worse. It's still a great little dictionary, though, and really this sort of correction isn't that hard - basically we'll just write a little program that flags any characters that don't match their Pinyin, something we'd already wanted to do for a couple of our other dictionaries. At whatever point they release a second edition with their own corrections / expansions / etc it shouldn't be too difficult to move everyone over to that.

 

[Alexis]

Alexis, do you encounter a lot of Pinyin errors in headwords or are they mostly in example sentences?

Most, if not all, the errors I've seen have been in the example sentence. I can't recall any problems with the headwords thus far.

I do like the idea of releasing it 'as is' as an upgrade and then doing the fixes for the bundled version.

 

[mikelove]

Headwords are a bigger worry since the data from those gets stored in flashcards - we'll probably add a "rebuild flashcards" command at some point that repopulates the headword/pinyin fields in dictionary-based flashcards based on the entries they link to, but we're really trying to make sure those are as accurate as possible in the first go-round. Might not be too difficult to check just the headword pinyin against another dictionary, though, since that's more clearly isolated than the pinyin in example sentences.