Best Online Chinese Dictionary?

[Johnny20270]

I know its almost 6 years old thread (should I be reviving these?) but still very relevant

 

I just voted and realized that I always use the most popular one voted for here.  It was just a book mark I made years ago as I thought it was good

[tooironic]

Years later, I now use Pleco (with the paid add-ons 现代汉语规范词典, 古汉语大词典 and 21st Century English-Chinese Dictionary) and Wenlin (an excellent C-E dictionary based on the ABC Dictionary) an equal amount of time. However I do use and recommend the following online Chinese-Chinese dictionaries:

• 在线新华字典
• Zdic.net
• 國語辭典 (there is an app for this one as well)

And plenty of Google too when looking for obsure terms when doing translating work.

[Johnny20270]

I'm a long way off a C-C dictionary  

 

I like Pleco too but the problem is its on an online version. I keep a excel spreadsheet with all the words I have come across in my learning material. Now I was manually copying words from mdgb and pasting it into a spreadsheet. Not that tedious as I only do about 5-8 new words a day. The reason for this is that I can add my own example sentences and then dump the lot into ANKI. Personal I prefer using a spreadsheet for preparation of study materials and phone for flashcards

 

For the beginners, this might be useful tip if you use ANKI. I worked out a faster way for generating your words If you have come across say 10 new Hanzi words. You can just type these in cells A1 to A10. I see you can download the whole CCEDIT dictionary, so you can dump that into a worksheet and use a vlookup or match statement in excel to get the relevant English Definition/PinYin etc There is a bit of simple VBA code to be done to get the CCEDIT dictionary into proper excel format. Otherwise you could use database objects but for this task a bit of VBA is all that's required. Oh the only thing you need is to have excel 2010 onwards as there are circa 110,000 words and older versions of excel have only 65k rows. New versions have ~1.048m

[imron]

*shameless plug* an even better method is to use my own Chinese Text Analyser, which will take words you have marked from a document and export a variety of fields including definitions, pinyin (with tone marks), traditional and simplified chars, and the sentence from the document (with optional cloze deletion) to a tab separated file which can then be imported directly to Anki or Pleco.

 

Even better is that it tracks words you know over time and when you open a new document it'll automatically highlight words you do and don't know.  When exporting, you can also sort these words by frequency, first occurrence and so on, to help prioritise which ones to learn first.

[Johnny20270]

*shameless plug* an even better method is to use my own Chinese Text Analyser, which will take words you have marked from a document and export a variety of fields including definitions, pinyin (with tone marks), traditional and simplified chars, and the sentence from the document (with optional cloze deletion) to a tab separated file which can then be imported directly to Anki or Pleco.

 

Even better is that it tracks words you know over time and when you open a new document it'll automatically highlight words you do and don't know.  When exporting, you can also sort these words by frequency, first occurrence and so on, to help prioritise which ones to learn first.

 

 

 

ahhh bugger, should have looked at that before!   My various tools have been 'work in progress' for a long time. Even wrote my pinyin with tones marks like yours Not as good as yours though as not in real time as only wrote it for use in excel.  I have a background in development but my knowledge of core windows development is getting rusty

 

Will have a look at your links. 

[ouyangjun]

I mainly use Pleco.  If I can't find it on Pleco I normally search on http://www.baidu.com... Lot's of good stuff there.

[hellochinese]

I would recommend 有道 YouDao dictionary, edited and managed by Netease.

[tooironic]

When I teach translating and interpreting, I have to ban the use of YouDao in the classroom. I've found there's just too much Chinglish and mistranslation.

[AdamD]

One of my (Chinese) teachers felt the need to warn us that she knows online translation when she sees it. Frankly I find it staggering that some language students think a machine can get them out of scrapes academically, even in 2014.

 

When I use online dictionaries, I tend to use a couple each time. One will inevitably throw up several words that match what I'm after, so comparing it with another service helps to refine that. On my iPhone it's usually Pleco (CEDICT, Adso, Oxford, ABC, Pleco) and 有道 for looking up words, and 有道, 海词词典 and Google for passage translation. The iOS nciku app is a massive rip-off and was actively horrible last time I used it.

[歐博思]

www.iciba.com

[Johnny20270]

One of my (Chinese) teachers felt the need to warn us that she knows online translation when she sees it. Frankly I find it staggering that some language students think a machine can get them out of scrapes academically, even in 2014.

 

Don't even know why a student would bother trying to pass off a machine translation as their own? Aren't you there to learn the language?  Whats the point of moving abroad and paying a school fee to try cheat?  Perhaps if a grade is important, they might be tempted   

 

In anycase I have never seen a decent machine translation in any language. Although, they are making progress when compared to the early ones