Beta Testers for Social Language Dictionary

[projectgcm]

Hi,

We are GonzoChinese and we are creating the world’s first social Chinese-English language dictionary. We would love for you to sign up and tell us what you think about it. Our private beta test launches April 1st 2007 and all you have to do is sign up at www.GonzoChinese.com

You're probably wondering what a social language dictionary actually is! Well, this innovative and free website allows you to share audio clips of your own voice, as well as translations and sentences submitted by other members - such as your friends, teachers, or students. Visit the website to learn how you can become part of GonzoChinese.

http://www.GonzoChinese.com

Thanks!

[roddy]

Timing out from Beijing. If it's a recently registered domain name it might just be that the DNS hasn't been updated yet.

[projectgcm]

Hi Roddy,

Unfortunately we are using wordpress for our beta test sign up and it is block in China. If you are interested just shoot me an email at gonzochinese@gmail.com and we will get you a user name and password.

Thanks!

Sorry about the inconvenience

[roddy]

Can I ask what dictionary you'll be using to get started? Also, how are users' entries going to be licensed? Are they going to be available for use in other commercial / non-commercial applications?

[projectgcm]

Hi Roddy,

We are starting with David Lancashire's Adsotrans database. We will be similiar to www.urbandictionary in terms of use.

At ths time we are planning to be the sole owner of the definitions and other data collected on the Site unless such material is owned and copyrighted by another person or entity. However, we aren't 100% set in stone on this path.

We haven't decided which route to take in terms of comercial use. We just want to create a free online tool that will help people learn mandarin and at the same time be able to cover our cost to provide this tool.

We would love to hear some feedback from you. I'm sure you have run across many "learn Chinese" websites and other Chinese language online resources and we'd love to get some of your opinions on them. In terms of online Chinese-English dictionaries which do you think are the best? What do you like about them? Knowing we are an online dictionary where we depend on users to contribute, what would motivate you to contribute?

My team and I are all learners of the language and just wish there were some better tools available to make learning easier. We love how there are so many resources out there, but we are disappointed there's nothing really out there that makes us go "wow." Our goal is to create that "wow" factor and we realize we need help from the people lke you and the community you've built here.

Regards,

Daniel

[roddy]

It is a tricky one. It's quite likely that any one person's input isn't going to amount to a massive amount, but added together you have something that developers of say, commercial flashcard programs, might like to pay to use. A usable dictionary interface for Adsotrans would certainly be a good thing though.

[projectgcm]

Hi,

Just wanted to let everyone them know that www.GonzoChinese.com is live. We are currently in our Alpha test and appreciate any feedback we can get to make the system better for you. All you have to do is go to www.GonzoChinese.com and sign up. We would like to see how we can make learning Chinese fun for you.

If you have any questions or concerns just email me at Daniel@GonzoChinse.com

Thanks,

Daniel

[Hero Doug]

What do you plan to do about validting user entries.

The problem with sites that rely on user contributions is that users are often wrong and regularly pass along incorrect information.

[roddy]

You'll get much more feedback if you stop hiding everything behind a registration wall, or at least provide a guest password for people who want to have a look but aren't interested in signing up.

[in_lab]

The site requires registration to view the dictionary, as far as I can tell. I'd like to check it out in the Beta stage if it allows viewing without registration.

[Pravit]

Have not looked at your site yet, although I just wanted to comment on some of my favorite Chinese-English dictionary sites and why I like them:

Dictionaries I like

www.dict.cn - mostly built on user contributions and has a ton of vocabulary that I can't find in PlecoDict. Kind of intended for Chinese learners of English, but still very useful. The best part are the example sentences - although some have rather hilarious translations, and others are simply incorrect, most of them are very helpful in understanding when to use a particular word. Points for a sleek Googlesque interface too. I use this dictionary a ton when I'm using the computer and sometimes even when I'm not. If you want to make a Chinese dictionary with user contributions, consider what the people at dict.cn did.

http://www.chineseetymology.org - awesome because you can see the etymology and 说文解字 entries. I usually use it when I want to find some kind of mnemonic for a particularly weird character(helps to remember chars when I know where they came from) or if I just get curious sometimes. Otherwise, I do not really use it very often.

http://online.eon.com.hk/ - not really a dictionary, but amazingly useful. For free, you can see the stroke order and variants of any character. No more browsing random university Chinese program websites in the hopes of finding some animation for the obscure character I can't write.

Dictionaries I don't like

Zhongwen.com - The most overrated website in Chinese language learning. Looking up Chinese words is inefficient and slow. Loses points for underhanded swipes at 毛主席, too. ;)

[Pravit]

I also forgot to mention the Wordsketch engine, which seems quite useful from the trial, but there's no way I'm going to pay to use it.

[projectgcm]

Hero Doug- We have taken this consideration into mind while building the website. We have developed a system to promote people that are contributing good content and also have a developed a way to filter out content that may not be accurate. It is still a contributal dictionary so some bad content may slip through, but in time we hope to have great contributors that are motivated to learn Chinese to help police the content.

Roddy & In_lab- We are defintely not trying to hide anything behind the registration wall. We are really in the early stages of development and would just like to know who is using our system. We are not using it to spam, we really need people who are going to try the website out and give us some useful feedback so that in all we can have free system useful for everyone to use. If you do not feel comfortable about registering you can always shoot me an email at Daniel@GonzoChinese.com and we can work something out.

Pravit- Thanks for the links we have seen all these and also think that Dict.cn is a very great dictionary. We also find it geared towards Chinese people learning English. We eventually will be adding features such as sentences, and many other features. It would be great if you could check out our website when you get a chance and tell us what you think. All feedback we see if good feeback.

Thanks everyone

[gato]

Why would people register to use a dictionary when there are so many other choices out there?

[in_lab]

This thread has began on Mar. 22 and no one has admitted yet to registering and actually seeing the dictionary. They could at least add some samples or screenshots to prove that it is worth the registration.

[roddy]

If you do not feel comfortable about registering you can always shoot me an email at Daniel@GonzoChinese.com and we can work something out.

You mean 'register'.

It's up to you how you run it, but there are already plenty of dictionary products out there and you need to make it as accessible as possible - any extra effort is going to result in massive fall-off in interest, especially when you're effectively asking for help rather than saying there's a useful service behind that login box. And given that 95% of Internet users surf with one hand on the mouse and the other tucked into their trousers*, use of the keyboard to type in an email address and password constitutes extra effort. A good stats program such as Analytics will let you track what people are actually doing on the site.

Roddy

*Don't we?

[chairman_tap]

Hi everyone i guess I thought I'd chime in on this interesting conversation. My name is Ben and I'm one of the founders of gonzochinese. I understand everyone's hesitation about registering for our website. I know in this internet day and age everyone is all paranoid about people misusing your information and spamming you beyond belief. I feel the same way about registering for any website myself. I know it's hard to believe someone over the internet, but my intentions for this website are very straight forward: to build the most useful FREE Chinese-English, English-Chinese online dictionary. Period.

Here's my brief story:

I was born and grew up in the States, Michigan to be exact, forced to attend weekend Chinese school. The books were horrible--boring, poorly written and I hated it. While everyone else was going camping, playing with their friends, and doing everything I felt at the time kids should be doing, instead I was reciting Chinese poems which had no relevance to my life whatsoever (I didn't appreciate regular English poetry for that matter). The point is that I had no motivation to learn Chinese. One day my cousins from Taiwan visited and they brought me a Chinese "textbook" that I had never laid eyes on before. It was the Japanese comic book "Dragonball" only written all in Chinese. From that day on forth I was hooked on Chinese and wanted to learn more. Granted I wasn't learning the most appropriate Chinese (the pages were littered with " [pop=I/wǒ]我[/pop][pop=must/yào]要[/pop][pop=take/bǎ]把[/pop][pop=you/nǐ]你[/pop][pop=to kill/dǎsǐ]打死[/pop]！"), but my whole perspective and motivation to learn had changed. Our goal with this website is not simply just to make another Chinese-English dictionary. As many have already pointed out there are already a billion of them out there. What I've challenged my team and I to do is to make Chinese learning fun and engaging. The social dictionary we are building is the start of this journey for us.

What makes us different than other dictionaries? And how does this benefit you...

First, we are a social dictionary--what this means is that we are building a community where the strength of the dictionary is only as strong as the users who contribute, review, and request content. Benefit: if you don't find something that you want to know, request it and allow the community to help you.

Second, we designed the website with usability in mind from a western perspective (I'm American after all). This means big text boxes and Chinese characters you can see. Benefit: you don't go blind and you can see how the characters are actually written (both simplified and traditional)

Third, we integrated audio capability into the website. Personally, not only do I want to know what a word means, but how to say it and not from just a computerized text to speech voice, but from actual humans. Who are doing the recordings? Me, you, and the rest of the community. Benefit: you can now find a virtually limitless supply of different types of audio, different dialects, gender, age, skill level, etc...

Fourth (this will be my last point), this is free and will always be free. Down the road I probably will have to add advertisements to support my costs. And eventually I would like to be able to scrape off some living from this project, but my belief is that if we can solve a big problem (lack of good online resources for learning Chinese), the money will eventually come. This is a fundamentally different approach from quite a few of the "better" dictionaries out there and Chinese language software developers, who i feel are out there make money first and solve problems second. Benefit: you don't have to spend $100 bucks on a useful dictionary.

So why are we here asking for your help?

I want to clarify to everyone that we just launched a test version of our website. To even say we are beta is probably a little too much. We are definitely more in alpha state than beta. There are bugs, features that haven't been implemented, pages that have yet to be added, etc...so why are we here? My philosophy on web development (and i'm not an expert by any measure) is to make a prototype, get it into the hands of people who might use it, take their complaints and feedback seriously, and then improve the website. A lot of websites or software developers take a different approach to development. The developers think they know what's best, build the website, and then push it out to the world, people complain and then things sometimes get changed or otherwise fall on deaf ears. I'll be the first to tell you that I don't know what the best way to design a Chinese-English dictionary is...and that is the reason I wanted to approach all of you here on Chinese-Forums. Simply put, we want to build tools that people use. If you don't like them or don't use them, then we have failed. I love the community that roddy built here and rather than going just to random people to ask for feedback, I wanted to go the community that could directly benefit from what we are building.

Why we have a password and why you have to register?

You are absolutely right that we would probably get more people to check out the website if we didn't have them register. However, let me clarify why we ask for your email address on our front page. The email we ask on the front page is to just allow us to send interested users the password for our website. The reasoning behind this is that we think people who will go through the effort of asking for the password will actually also give us useful feedback. However, seeing as we've asked you for your feedback it would make more sense for us to give you the password, so if you are curious about the website go to it and when it asks for a password simply type in "ziploc".

password = "ziploc"

Once you are in if you want to register to get access to the other features like requesting and submitting translations then you will need to do so. The reasoning here being we want to encourage good content into the system.

Someone also had a good idea about posting screenshots of our website. That's a wonderful idea and I'll get to that as well. I have started a blog (blog.gonzochinese.com) which will talk more about the website as well as other resources out there for Chinese learning.

Thanks a lot already for the feedback you guys have given. We are learning and trying to improve and we really appreciate your patience. My honest goal is help the language learning community. I've babbled way more than i should of, but if any of you would like to talk more I'd love to hear your comments...you can email me at: ben@gonzochinese.com or call me at 714-369-8083.

[Pravit]

Excellent story, Ben.

Don't mean to take the piss, but can't help commenting on one of the translation requests on your site:

"That Bad boy should be castrated "

Ah, growing pains in starting a new Web 2.0 site. You see how registration was not really a very effective filter? ;)

[chairman_tap]

Hey Pravit,

Thanks for the kind words and thank you so much for your feedback. I can definitely tell you use a lot of the resources that are out there for learning Chinese. You would be what I would consider our "model user."

Haha, it's actually really funny about that "That bad boy should be castrated." My sister is actually the one that contributed that gem. I sent her the link and she decided to get creative. So you are right, even if you do have people register it doesn't guarantee anything. But at the same time, I like how if someone really wants to know how to say something they have a place to learn it (cause I know in school they wouldn't teach the word "castrated").

keep the comments coming though...

[Pravit]

I did take a look at your site, though, and here's what I think:

The supremacy of dict.cn

1. The reason I use dict.cn is for translations of words I can't find in any other dictionary, but more importantly, example sentences - translations are pointless without context. Any dictionary worth its salt will have some example sentences for words that could be used incorrectly(ideally, for all words), but your site has none. You will also need to attract a large userbase of native Chinese speakers if you want your site to have any useful content - I would not use a Chinese dictionary with content contributed mostly by foreigners. I don't know how dict.cn got its wealth of obscure words and example sentences, but I imagine that they did not start from scratch - perhaps you need to include more content than just the adsotrans dictionary, just to get things started?

Example sentences are important for learning how to use a word in any foreign language, but for Chinese in particular they are crucial, because there are so many words with similar meaning that need to be used in different contexts(and sometimes need to be pronounced differently based on the context).

The problem with having a competitor like dict.cn is that to win me over, you would have to develop a website that not only does everything that dict.cn can do, but does it better.

On a side note, I think this example sentence at dict.cn is hilarious:

2. All fighters for communism are infidels.

所有的共产主义战士都是不信教者。

Rating systems

2. I think rating systems(on any website) are pretty pointless. Your main concern is providing accurate information to your users. I don't really see how a particular translation could have a "score" of accuracy or whatever the rating is supposed to represent. Ideally, your users could vote down poor translations, but why not use the time-tested system of flagging and intense(and competent) moderation? Again, you will need a decent amount of native Chinese speakers to do this.

WikiDictionary?

3. The idea behind, say, a wiki-encylopedia is that people interested in a subject will look up that article and add any information they know about it. However, a wiki-dictionary faces the problem that people will usually not look up words they already know. Even if they did, there are very few people that would bother adding their own translations and example sentences. And someone would have to be really charitable to spend their own time thinking up words that are not usually included in dictionaries and adding translations for them. You have addressed this with your requests section, but, let's take me as an example: if there is a word I cannot find in any non-web dictionary, I first look it up on dict.cn. The word is almost always on dict.cn. If it isn't, I usually google for it and figure out the meaning from context. If I can't figure it out, I go online and ask a Chinese IM friend what it means. The whole process takes 5 minutes at the most. I would not use the GonzoChinese request feature unless I could get an accurate explanation in under five minutes, or if I really could not figure out the word having exhausted all other methods. But right now I don't think I would use it at all, because it seems there aren't any Chinese who could answer my requests on the site. Just looking at the requests page, it doesn't seem like any of them have actually been answered, and those are simple ones! And where are the Chinese asking for help with English?

Speakouts

4. The speakout feature is a good idea, but for the same reasons above, unless you find some very charitable native speakers, your "speakout coverage" will probably be spotty and limited to odd requests. Of course, you do need some native speakers to make the speakouts to begin with. I haven't searched a lot on your site, but I haven't actually found any speakouts to listen to.

Things I'd like to see in an online Chinese dictionary(social or not):

1. A wordsketch-like site, but free. There is a huge amount of Chinese language data available on the net, and I usually google/baidu words to understand how to use them in context, but I would appreciate a site that eased this process and was also free. As great of an idea the wordsketch engine is, I would never pay to use it unless it became a) a low one-time fee or B) an extremely low recurring fee(on the order of $1-$5).

2. Detailed explanation of how to use words in context or the different shades of meaning associated with related words, and, of course, EXAMPLE SENTENCES! It would be nice if, on an entry of one of several related words, they could mention those related words and tell you how they are the same and how they differ with respect to usage.

3. I don't find speakouts for individual words particularly interesting(esp. since when people pronounce a single word they'll overemphasize it instead of saying it like they normally would) but speakouts for example sentences would be amazing. It might even make me use that site instead of(or at least along with) dict.cn.

I have even more opinions, but this post has already gotten quite long, so I'll save them for another time.

I enjoyed reading your story and think you have a good cause, though, so good luck!