Clavis Sinica?

[fulgentius]

Hello,

I've just spent an hour searching for information about Clavis Sinica around here and I haven't found much. I'd like to get some opinions on it because I was thinking it looks pretty good.

Thanks!

[gato]

Have you tried it yet? I once downloaded a demo and found it too slow to use.

You might try one of the free tools available on the "Best of Chinese Study Tools" thread that can do the same thing, possibly even better. Dimsum and the Popup Chinese Translator extension for Firefox are both very good.

http://www.chinese-forums.com/index.php?/topic/8195-best-of-chinese-study-tools-studying-chinese-online-and-off

Best of Chinese Study Tools

[honeybums]

i bought clavis sinica. but the characters aren't complete. some softwares will give you the pinyin even if it can't give you the meaning. at least with that you can go and find it in the dictionary. but clavis sinica doesn't give you that. if you are a pc user i suggest you use njstar and if you are a mac user you can use wenlin. its a bit pricey but its well worth it. there are demo downloads for both.

[David W Jackson]

I love Clavis Sinica and highly recommend it for the same reason I recommended my students to dispense with their jumbo-sized Advanced Oxfords they lug to class - less is definitely more. Clavis's dictionary is nowhere near as large as Wenlin's ABC and that's the advantage. Plus you can use it to read any Big5, Unicode or GB coded online text - once you c and p it.The dictionary contains over 25,000 separate entries, fully searchable in both English and Chinese, including approximately 4,000 characters and over 21,000 multi-character compound words, phrases, and idioms, or chengyu.

And all for $60 - quite a bit less expensive than Wenlin.

Here's the Program Features from the website:

Text Reader Window - Clavis Sinica's integrated Text Reader Window allows you to:

Display and read ANY Chinese text file stored in the commonly used GB, Big5, or Unicode formats, including web documents and Chinese word processor files

Instantly access pinyin pronunciation and concise English glosses for any unfamiliar Chinese word or character

Recognize multi-character compounds, phrases, and idioms in context

Hear characters and compounds pronounced in a native Mandarin Chinese voice

View any Chinese text in either simplified or traditional characters

Create vocabulary lists of new words you have learned for future reference or for drilling using the built-in flashcard tool

Edit and create Chinese texts using basic word processing features

Copy and paste Chinese text from other Windows applications, including web browsers and Microsoft Word.

Search for individual characters within lengthy Chinese documents

Print out Chinese documents in a clear, easy-to-read format

The 4,000 characters included in the Clavis Sinica dictionary account for approximately 98% of the characters to be found in a typical modern newspaper, and 100% of the characters found in any of the most commonly used college-level Chinese textbooks.The Clavis Sinica dictionary is based on the first level of the Guo Biao Chinese character set, which is the accepted standard in the PRC. The 3,754 characters in this set represent the most commonly used characters in the modern written language.

I checked out some of the email log testimonials from customers and the one I think sums it up best is the chap who said: "I've been studying Chinese in college now for 2 years and in the last two months using Clavis Sinica I have learned more than I did in those two years. I have read through 13 Lu Xun stories to the point that I could read the last one without the aid of this program.Thanks".

Anyway, I think it's totally brilliant (interesting aside: the German chap Andreas Mueller's method - from which the prod gets its name - now wouldn't that be worth getting hold of! Pity he burnt his notes). Check out the site: www.clavisinica.com

[Xiao Kui]

i downloaded the demo, and clicking in some sample texts, the dictionary returns seemed promising. So i bought the software, pasted in a chapter of Lao She's Rickshaw Boy, and the dictionary was TOTALLY INADEQUATE. It was fine for clicking on the characters, but missed more than half the words I tried to look up.

No wonder copy and paste don't work in the demo version, they don't want you to know how crappy the dictionary is. EXTREMELY DISAPPOINTED. I think I'll stick with my zdt and NJstar from now on, and the new adsotrans textbook site, which I plan to donate to as soon as I can.

[David W Jackson]

Maybe Lao She's Rickshaw Boy is a fairly advanced text,

and that someone who is reading comfortably at that level probably

doesn't need Clavis Sinica. Their website says that the

dictionary has 25,000 words, no more, no less, and that this is

generally held to be adequate for most student purposes. The Oxford Pocket Chinese-

English dictionary would have the same shortcomings when put up

against a text like this, and yet it's still held to be a good

learning tool for students up to a certain stage.

[gato]

One of these free software would probably be a better choice than Clavis Sinica:

http://www.chinese-forums.com/index.php?/topic/8195-best-of-chinese-study-tools-studying-chinese-online-and-off

Online

• Popup Chinese Translator extension for Firefox
  
• popjisyo.com
  
• Rikai.com

Offline

• Dimsum (provides pop-up definition for both websites and offline texts; uses Java, should run on PC/Mac/and more)
  
• Wakan (PC; Chinese and Japanese dictionary, text editor, vocabulary manager, and text translation tool).

[dporter1465]

There are plenty of decent Chinese dictionary programs out there, and some good Chinese text readers. There are only two programs, though, that provide you with the analysis of characters into their component (radical and phonetic) parts, and allow you to see, at the click of a mouse, lists of other characters that use these same parts, along with lists of compound words using a given character. These features can be very helpful for students of the written language who like to learn new words through their relationships with other words they already know. The two programs are Clavis Sinica and Wenlin.

While Wenlin has a considerably larger dictionary, suitable for advanced graduate students and even professional sinologists, the Clavis dictionary, with 25,000+ entries, is more than adequate for most student purposes. In addition, the concise English definitions allows for the presentation of many related words and meanings in a tabular form, allowing the student to immediately recognize the connections among them. Clavis also features natural-sounding audio rendition of Chinese words, a flexible flashcard system, and an intuitive interface allowing the user easily to display lists of characters using a shared radical or phonetic, and lists of compounds using a given character. The academic version of Clavis Sinica sells for less than a quarter of the price of Wenlin. You can find a long list of user comments about CS at www.clavisinica.com/mailbox.html.

[mikelove]

I believe that's true for offline dictionaries, but Zhongwen.com offers that same character component lookup feature in an online format, so if you're trying to put something together with free software, that would give you a way to get component lookups for free (if without the convenience of having it built in to your other software).

No comment on the other stuff, I don't want to seem like a snarky competitor here, but since directing people to free software is presumably steering them away from Pleco as much as it's steering them away from Clavis it didn't seem too out-of-line for me to mention Zhongwen.

[roddy]

Can I ask where Clavis Sinica's dictionary actually comes from? Is a licensed commercial dictionary, something you've written yourself, or something developed out of an open source dictionary?

[Xiao Kui]

Maybe Lao She's Rickshaw Boy is a fairly advanced text,

and that someone who is reading comfortably at that level probably

doesn't need Clavis Sinica.

Yes, it's advanced, but so is the Lu Xun text they provide as a sample with the demo, so the logical conclusion one might draw is that the dictionary would be adequate for other difficult texts as well. What I don't understand is the whole "more is less" concept. I don't see how defining a word correctly is going to confuse a new learner of Chinese. Why not upgrade the dictionary and make it useful for everyone, because the way it is now, the new learners will grow out of it pretty quickly as well. But it is comforting to know that if people who take Chinese in US universities don't need a better dictionary than what CS has to offer, those of us who've learned here in the good old PRC will have no problems snatching up the grad school spots when we return to the old country.

[fulgentius]

How many characters (or words, whichever you prefer) did you learn in your first year of study? Just curious.

Thanks for the thoughts, everyone. I do like the radical lookup idea. Still, I think I will hold off another semester, when reading texts in the wild will be a bit more realistic.

[dporter1465]

The Clavis dictionary is unique in that we decided early on to limit English definitions (they might actually better be termed "glosses") to a length of 25 letters, in order to allow a list of related definitions to be displayed together in a single window for the sake of comparison. So, for example, when you bring up a list of all the characters that use a given radical, you can easily scan through the list of definitions to get a better sense of the semantic value of the radical. Same holds with lists of compounds using the same character: there's no better way, in our view, to grasp the meaning(s) of a character than to observe how it's used in compound words.

In any case, the upshot of this design decision was that we had to create our own custom dictionary. Our sources included a dozen different print dictionaries and lexical reference books, a similar number of widely used Chinese language textbooks (see complete list here), several online lexicons, and the expertise of a number of native speakers we employed in developing the project. Our dictionary does not pretend to "completeness" any more than does any student dictionary. But with over 4,000 characters and 25,000 total entries, it is more than adequate for most student learning purposes.

[self-taught-mba]

How many characters (or words, whichever you prefer) did you learn in your first year of study? Just curious.

That thread going on right now over here.

[dporter1465]

What I don't understand is the whole "less is more" concept. I don't see how defining a word correctly is going to confuse a new learner of Chinese.

This raises a number of issues that are interesting from a philosophical as well as a pedagogical perspective. First, there's the question of whether there can be such a thing as a "correct definition." This notion is based on the assumption that words or concepts and their "translations" into other languages are really commensurate, an assumption, of course, which is encouraged by bilingual dictionaries of all shapes and sizes. I think it's questionable whether a "definition" of any length is going to enable us to fully grasp the meaning of 自然, 性, 气, 心, 道, 理, 像, 仁, or any of countless other seemingly "basic" words whose meanings have been shaped by a rich and complex cultural history. Given this reality, I think there's some virtue in avoiding the illusion that any definition is "correct" or "complete." The glosses provided in the Clavis dictionary have the very modest aim of pointing the user in the right general direction, with the assumption that nuance and complexity of understanding will emerge over time from the contexts in which a particular word is used.

A second, more general question concerns the role of definitions in the production of knowledge. The history of Western thought has been dominated by a rationalist tradition that puts considerable weight on clear definitions of terms. The history of traditional Chinese thought has been dominated by an analogical tradition that puts far more weight on examples and models as means of understanding key ideas. I think any foreigner who has ever used a good Chinese textbook will recognize that a set of five or six well-constructed usage examples can be far more helpful than a "definition" in grasping what a new word really means.

[leosmith]

The glosses provided in the Clavis dictionary have the very modest aim of pointing the user in the right general direction, with the assumption that nuance and complexity of understanding will emerge over time from the contexts in which a particular word is used.

Nice post dporter1465. People have different ways of studying. Some like to look up words and example sentences, really nailing down the correct usage of a word, before they get a lot of exposure to it. Others prefer to learn only by encountering the words, and avoid learning out of context. I'd like to learn only by encounter, but I just can't memorize that way. I'm a very visual learner - I need to see the word. So I like to cram lists of words up front. To me, the definitions are only approximate; sort of like really strong mnemonics. When I encounter the words in real life, the usage gets nailed down very easily.

[Czech Cara]

I am occasionally using a made- in- China Kingsoft Power 2006 c-a a-c dictionary, most times I get English words I ve never used, since they are the closest in meaning. A good dictionary has to take into account the occurence frequency of the words. { corpus based dictionaries} Maybe this is meant by the "less is more philosophy"

With such a difference as between English and Chinese, I always try to stick to examples, letting the meaning {a disputable term itself, ref. J. Derrida} be induced in my lazy little brain... Clavis Sinica would beat the rest, if it were free....

[dporter1465]

With such a difference as between English and Chinese, I always try to stick to examples, letting the meaning {a disputable term itself, ref. J. Derrida} be induced in my lazy little brain... Clavis Sinica would beat the rest, if it were free....

Thanks for the feedback. Note that Clavis Sinica is made available for free or on a sliding scale for users unable to pay full price. See www.clavisinica.com/ordering.html for details. You can also find some user comments on our pricing policy at www.clavisinica.com/mailbox.html.