request: toneless dictionary search + dictionary oddities

[onebir]

The request: It seems the dictionary search is tone dependent. 'jiguan' gives no hits, but 'ji1guan1' does - even when the search is set to contain.

For a tone deaf person like me, it'd be great to be able to search disregarding tones....

The oddity:

Searching for strings containing 'ji' gives a whole load of results with pinyin that doesn't contain 'ji' - it's in the definition. I guess 'ji' could be english, so ZDT is giving it the benefit of the doubt and pulling up entries with ji in pinyin or definition. But i think it would be better if the entry were checked against valid pinyin syllables - and if it's one of them ZDT would only pull out entries with matching pinyin. The 18 pages of 'ji' hits resulting from the current setup make it a real slog to find the right character...

[smalltownfart]

My free dictionary for MDict on the PocketPC can lookup using toneless pinyin (single and compound chars)

http://china.panlogicsoftware.com/

I will consider porting it to StarDict on win/macos/linux/etc, if I see that there is sufficient demand.

Maybe Chris can comment if the ZDT search function can be "pluggable" or customizable.

[gato]

StarDict searches work without tones.

http://stardict.sourceforge.net/Dictionaries.php

[bogleg]

You can search without tones. Replace the tone number with the underscore character (ie. wo_) If you don't use a tone number or underscore, then it assumes you're searching an english definition.

Hey Wade - do you mean dictionaries being pluggable? If not, what do you mean?

Chris

[onebir]

You can search without tones. Replace the tone number with the underscore character (ie. wo_) If you don't use a tone number or underscore, then it assumes you're searching an english definition.

Aaaahhh - thank you! Apologies if this is in the documentation somewhere and i missed it...

[stephanhodges]

Actually, what I want is the opposite. I want to search for tones without any pinyin. The reason for this is to generate word lists of different tone combinations for practice. It's a bit specialized, but difficult to do.

Even asking several Chinese friends, and they have a hard time on the spot coming up with a number of 3-3 words, etc.