StarDict, Speak Good Chinese, and 五笔快打

[shibole]

I recently installed StarDict and it seems to be pretty good, but I have noticed that the dictionaries I have don't seem to give pronunciation for all characters. I have CEDICT installed along with "21世紀英漢漢英雙向詞典", and the later seems to have a lot more words, but for some reason even words that should be in CEDICT don't seem to come up sometimes, and 21世紀 seems to lack pinyin for some reason.

Any recommendation on what dictionaries to install with stardict that will actually give me pinyin and a definition? I'm starting to think their CEDICT file is old.

Also, it seems that Speak Good Chinese stopped working after I installed stardict, at least that's what I suspect caused it. My guess is that it has something to do with incompatible GTK libraries or something.

Lastly, I got my brother-in-law to register 五笔快打 for me but after 3 days they still haven't sent me the license key . I'm just curious as to how other people have registered it and how long it took them to get the license key. He registered it using my email address so it should have come to me.... perhaps I should have gotten him to register it using his email address then forward me the key. I sent some mail to softreg.com.cn (the "registration center") and shunsoft but it was after business hours when I did it so they haven't replied yet.

It seems like trying to do things online in China is even more inconvenient than doing them in person

[darkprince]

startdict is an AWESOME product.

What platform are you working on? I've only ever used it on unix/linux as i don't use windows. There are hundreds of dictionaries that startdict can use, you just have to hunt them down. stardicts website has a few. I'll see if i can dig up the assortment i use

[shibole]

I'm using it in Windows.

I went through all the dictionaries on the web site and tried to pick the ones that made sense. I just wish they all had pronunciation. (What good is a chinese dictionary without pronunciation? If you don't know what something written in hanzi means then most likely you don't know how to pronounce it either....)

I've noticed in windows that the mouseover "scan" feature doesn't always pick up the text properly from UI elements. Sometimes it picks up the character 30 or 40 pixels to the right of the pointer, and sometimes it never picks it up at all. Still I think stardict is pretty good.

[darkprince]

Startdict was never actually written for windows, it was only ported. This is why it may seem a little buggy

[gato]

Try installing the DrEye4in1词典 and 朗道汉英字典

[in_lab]

Stardict is nice, but unfortunately, all the good Chinese dictionaries (which means pretty much anything but CEDict) are pirated. This isn't an anti-pirating announcement, but if the dictionaries' conversion to stardict don't look totally professional, it may have something to do with that. There are good English dictionaries in the public domain, though. It would be great if you could buy good dictionaries in text format, and play with as you like.

[imron]

Probably not much use at the moment, but when you get to the point where you can use a Chinese-Chinese Dictionary I would recommend the 现代汉语词典 that you can download from the startdict site. I have the paper version of this, and also a version for Plecodict that I converted from the stardict version. It has pronunciation, meaning and examples, and is so far my favourite Chinese-Chinese dictionary. Re: Piracy, if I could buy an electronic version to use with Pleco then I would, as it stands, I'm currently not left with much choice. That of course will change once v2 is released and has it's own C-C dictionary. (I know there's a public beta, but it's not yet at a point where I would use it as a replacement for v1).

Regarding 五笔快打, I received the registration email on a sunday evening, so it almost certainly took a few days for them to process the order. It was a long time ago that I registered (May 2005 according to the email), so I can't remember how many days it took exactly (unfortunately I don't have a record of the mail I sent them) but it almost certainly took a few days.

[youpii]

You can also try Lingoes http://lingoes.net/ maybe it's good for you.

[shibole]

謝謝 for the responses

Try installing the DrEye4in1词典 and 朗道汉英字典

That seems to give me some pinyin but no tone marks

Regarding 五笔快打, I received the registration email on a sunday evening, so it almost certainly took a few days for them to process the order.

Ok, their site claimed 24 hours but I'm guessing that's a bunch of BS. The "registration center" said they'd provide a refund if there was no license provided within a week, so I guess that's more indicative of reality. I guess I'm a little too eager to "beat characters".

You can also try Lingoes http://lingoes.net/ maybe it's good for you.

Thanks youpii. I tried that one out and it has a bit less buggy mouseover support but none of the dictionaries have pinyin

[youpii]

none of the dictionaries have pinyin

For Stardict & Lingoes, you can click on the characters that you don't know, they will search them in the Chinese dicts and show the pinyin