Where to buy electronic dictionaries in Beijing

[Erikssc]

I am looking to buy an electronic pocket dictionary designed for english speakers studying mandarin. I think most dictionaries found in electronic shops are mainly for Chinese students studying english. The problem with most of them is that when writing pinyin words containing more than one character, it won't understand. I.e. if you write "jintian" which contains two characters it won't be able to translate. You have to write "jin" first, select the character, and then write "tian" and select the character. This is of course basically worthless for us. I see many of the korean and japanese students have good dictionaries, but they are mostly bought in their home countries.

So my question is, where in Beijing can u buy electronic dictionaries that are made for english speakers studying Chinese?

[Nibble]

A lot of people buy a PDA and install PlecoDict on it. It's much better than most dedicated pocket dictionaries you'll find, plus it has all the nice features of a PDA.

[crow610]

PlecoDict is the best! I am in China now studying at BNU and this dictionary has been a lifesaver. Lots of people are amazed by the power of this program when they see how fast I can look up a character. You can probably find an old palm on ebay for around 100 that will support Pleco.

[crow610]

I was just looking at the BNU thread and realized that you are studying at BNU also. If you would like to meet up so I can show you the program PM me and we can arragne a time and place.

[hughitt1]

have you checked ebay? i never had any problems before ordering stuff off ebay in mainland..

[smalltownfart]

If you only care about the lookup and don't think you need the other functionality in plecodict, you might want to take a look at my (free!) dictionary for the Pocket PC:

http://china.panlogicsoftware.com

[KungFoo]

I also want to get one. I heard that a good place to go to is zhongguancun up near Beida. You can get the good ones by a company called Besta which has everything we would need but they are hard to get a hold of. I wanted to go down there and investigate today.

I also heard good things about getting a PDA with dictionry programs installed. I will look into that if my exploits are not fruitful.

Bestas can be bought online, and the good ones can do the things that your PDA can too, it plays mp3s, surfs the net, and acts as a calendar and diary etc...

If anyone finds something in Beijing, please share.

[adrianlondon]

I have a Besta, but I've given it to my boyfriend. It was fine, but the monochrome LCD display can be hard to see. They do make colour ones, but at those prices it's not much more expensive to buy a Palm and install Plecodict. I have a Palm TX and Plecodict if anyone wants to see it (on BNU campus).

Besta is a Taiwanese company (so the products might be marked "made in China" :-) and is in traditional characters by default. Although good, they are designed for chinese to learn English rather than the other way around, so expect some things to be a touch complicated. Having said all that, they do work and they work well.

[Erikssc]

Thanks for all your answers. After having been shown the functions of the Pleco programme on a Palm I will definitely be looking into buying one of those. I guess there are lots of places to buy a PDA in Beijing, but what about the operating system? Will it be in Chinese, or can u choose the language yourself? Any experiences with this?

[karmakid]

Ok I'm impressed.

Next Question is; where in BJ do i buy my pocketPC ?

cheap, preferably wlan... not interested in --> BT, Ir etc...

[KungFoo]

I have first hand experience, you CANNOT get the kind of dictionary we would want to use in China.

I am going to buy a palm when I have time, Ill be going to zhongguancun and buying the cheapest one that will work, less than $100. So it works out cheaper or the same as buying an electronic dictionary in the end anyway.

[crow610]

Looks like Amazon won't ship to China but maybe there is another big online retail site that will. Your other option is to ship it to someone you know in the US and then have them mail it to you. Palm does exist in China since they have a site: http://www.palm.com/cn/

but it's a matter of finding who sells it.

[roddy]

Finding Palm sellers in Beijing isn't too hard. Get on Zol.com.cn, find the model you want and click on 报价- you'll get a list of dealers. There are also places at Bainaohui, and no doubt in Zhongguancun.

[Nibble]

Most/all Palm PDAs sold in China are just regular English PDAs with NJStar's CJKOS (a program to display Chinese, Japanese, and Korean on Palms) installed on it, so you should have no trouble using it. You may need to ask the guy you're buying it from to turn off CJKOS' localisation feature so that all your menus are in English instead of Chinese.

[galaygobi]

If you're looking for a dictionary like most of your korean/japanese classmates use, have a look at the canon wordtank series which feature chinese/english, english/chinese dictionaries (http://cweb.canon.jp/wordtank/lineup.html). I have the V80, but I believe there are V90 and G90 models out that have more features.

These models feature the same input as said in your initial post by just typing in the full pinyin for 'jintian', plus have a pen for hanzi input.

I got mine off a seller on taobao.com about a year ago. Just e-mailed her and asked her to make an off-site purchase and she met up in person and exchanged cash/goods.

[teachinator]

A Chinese friend (a different one from the one who helped me mistakenly buy the BBG 9288s for $$ at Zhongguancun) has offered to go with me to buy the Palm TX since I'm now so nervous about making another expensive mistake. He asked how to say "Palm" in Chinese so he can ask around. Can someone tell me?

By the way, he mentioned buying it at a place called Guomei (that's the way I heard it, anyway), which is said is comparable to Fry's in the U.S. (with Fry's reputation, that's actually not such a compliment) and has a low-price guarantee. So that would be one place to check out.

I agree completely that one of the biggest problems with buying the units sold here and designed for Chinese speakers is that you can't enter a compound and get a choice of possible matches, as the originator of this thread said. The other big problem I've encountered with the BBG 9288s is that it has a TIMEOUT when you're doing manual character recognition. That is, if you pause for longer than .X seconds -- I think the max may be 1 second -- it gives you character matches on what you've written so far. For a Chinese learner who is frantically looking at a character and trying to get the strokes down, it is maddening to have the computer interrupt you before you've finished writing the character. Palm/Pleco lets you take all the time you want and push a button when you're ready to recognize.

I'm also convinced that the 9288s has a bias against manual entry by left-handed people, of which I am one :-) Sometimes it actually doesn't see some of my left-handed strokes, resulting in even more misrecognized characters.

[roddy]

Palm in Chinese is 奔迈, ben1mai4.

Guomei, and the similar big electronic retailers such as Dazhong and Suning, did not, last time I asked, stock PDAs. They do stock handheld organizers and electronic dictionaries, but not fully functional Palms and Pocket PCs. Won't do any harm to go in and ask though and your friend may be more up to date than me.

You might want to show your friend this, it's a list of quoted prices for the TX (ranging from 2050Y to 2150Y just now). He could perhaps phone around, see who can offer the best deal, and they will almost certainly deliver and let you check it's all functional if you don't want to go out shopping. If you already know what model you want, there's little to be gained by leaving the house. I've used these people a couple of times with good results, but they don't appear to have updated their website (currently showing 2680Y) for some time. Might be worth a phone call though.

See what extras you can get thrown in for free / cheap at the same time. Screen protectors (get them to fit these, they're tricky), a case, extra memory, maybe a spare stylus. Of those, I would say only a screen protector is essential.

[Erikssc]

Thanks for all your answers on this thread. To update you on the Palm TX, two of my friends and I bought Palm TX's in one of the big electronic buildings in Zhongguancun a couple of weeks ago. They were 1.840 RMB per piece. There is not a lot to save by buying more than one as the lowest they would go if buying only one piece was 1.850. This was the same in several of the shops there after bargaining for a while. You can choose english OS when you start it up so this is no problem.

The Pleco programme is USD 50 - 120 depending on how many dictionaries you want. I have already installed it on my Palm and it works perfectly. This is by far the best investment I have done in a long time. Highly recommended! And stay far away from the normal pocket dictionaries...

Guo Mei shops do not carry PDA's. Already checked in the one just north of BNU by the 3'rd ring road.

[teachinator]

One more comment as I have been following along in anticipation of replacing my BBG 9288s with a Palm plus PlecoDict. Quite aside from worrying about bargaining, these are issues I would never think about when buying in the U.S.

My local friend has told me that when I buy a Palm here in Beijing, the price will differ depending on whether 1) I'm getting a version that was brought into the country legally or, shall we say, "unofficially"; and 2) whether I need a receipt with a tax stamp or, um, not. The more by the books you go, the higher the cost.

I personally want to be sure I am going to be able to bring the device back into the U.S. with me when I go back in December and that Palm will honor its warranty once I'm back there, so I want everything absolutely aboveboard. Oh, and I want to pay with a credit card for the extra protections that affords. Based on that, my friend says I can get the Palm TX through someone in Zhongguancun whom his company deals with regularly for 2070 yuan. I'm supposed to go buy it on that basis tomorrow. Fingers crossed for everything going well and no more surprises.

Gee, I'll miss racing the 9288s to finish writing a character before it "recognizes" it ... but I'll get over it.

[adrianlondon]

Plecodict can also be set to perform a character lookup after a user-definable amount of time.

I use this. I like the race I find that if I can write a character quickly I am more likely to remember it in future.

Maybe your dictionary can also be adjusted.