Status of vocabulary in Wenlin

[Josh2007]

I am a great fan of the Wenlin software and its 200,000 Chinese words. It makes it very easy to read/translate things to have that much running vocabulary. But I am a bit dubious about the alternatives the dictionary gives. I think the dictionary may give some non-standard alternatives that may be met with. In terms of reading/translating, this helps, as if any of those alternatives are met with, they will appear in the running vocabulary. But you generally cannot use Wenlin to determine which is the "best" form of a word, or the form that a foreigner shoudl initially learn. What I mean are things like this:

Standard weights: 砝码 or 法码

Chronic illness: 痼疾 or 固疾

Rise abruptly: 崛起 or 倔起

Ostrich: 鸵鸟 or 驼鸟

Hammer: 榔头 or 狼头 or 鎯头

There are lots of instances of alternative characters in Wenlin to write the same word. In **some** cases, Chinese students have told me there is a genuine choice between two ways of writing a word, but in most of these words only one way is regarded as correct and the others are just occasionally seen, but seen as incorrect.

I just get the feeling that unlike the Contemporary Chinese Dictionary, which is meant to be an authoritative dictionary of Standard Mandarin, the WEnlin/ABCD is rather a descriptive dictionary of usage that may be found.

I just think it is worth bearing in mind the difference in the status of the vocabulary between these two useful dictionaries.

[lilongyue]

My "Oxford Concise English-Chinese, Chinese-English Dictionary" (3rd edition) often times give me the "bookish" version of a word and not the word used in spoken Chinese (when I'm going from English to Chinese). Not too happy about that.

I mostly use Wenlin for Chinese-English, when I'm translating, and am very happy with it. I am surprised by the words it doesn't have, but maybe the problem is that my version is a bit old.

[SWWLiu]

I'm not sure what it is that you are not too happy about in the "Oxford Concise English-Chinese, Chinese-English Dictionary" (1986), edited by WU Jing-Rong et al., published jointly by OUP & Commercial Press. The version I have access to (11th printing) looks quite good to me. I guess what you can sometimes do is to get the translation one way and go back the other way to see whether you can retrieve the original word(s); if there is too much divergence, then watch out. Granted, it is a bit more work, but the effort will be rewarded.

[lilongyue]

I guess what you can sometimes do is to get the translation one way and go back the other way to see whether you can retrieve the original word(s); if there is too much divergence, then watch out.

Or I just use Wenlin, look it up once, and I'm finished. That's my problem with the version of the Oxford Concise I have. I updated my Wenlin, by the way, and it filled in some gaps in the vocab.