nciku double take!

[Entropy_Rising]

You may be familiar with nciku.com - it's a great online dictionary. I just love its style, community, setup, and the resources it provides to any query. One of the cute things it does is add pictures to entries to help drive home the meaning of the word. So for 生气 there's a guy destroying his computer, for 秘密 there's a girl whispering something to her friend, and for 暗杀 there's a dead guy in a chalk outline. Cute style. Sometimes it helps me learn the word, but other times I kind of acclimate to them and ignore them.

So I was at nciku.com with the explicit purpose of once again drawing clear boundaries between 打扰，打乱，捣乱，and 捣蛋, which had originally been separate but got rusty overtime until I completely lost hold of the distinctions. Nciku helped a lot. Nonetheless, I was scrutinizing the various definitions of 打扰 - to bother, to distrub - when in the corner of my eye, noticed the provided picture, mentally said, "Nah, it can't be," then did a double take to found out, indeed, it was. Depending on what kind of boss you have this may be mildly NSFW.

The definition page

The provided picture

I provided both links because on the definition page the picture is little and was staring me in the face for a good minute or too before I noticed it. Hilarious! And pretty gutsy - though I think nciku despite being an excellent Chinese-English dictionary is managed by a Korean company, and Korea has notoriously lax standards when it comes to stuff like this. But they have a sense of humor, and I like that.

[mythia]

That's the spirit and if you like that, probably you'd like 伪基百科 as well.

[Scoobyqueen]

I use this site too. I especially like the fact you can draw the character and immediately it appears and also the audio of complete sentences.

[anonymoose]

Here's another one

苟合

http://www.nciku.com/search/zh/detail/%E8%8B%9F%E5%90%88/13584#

[Ole]

Entropy_Rising

So I was at nciku.com with the explicit purpose of once again drawing clear boundaries between 打扰，打乱，捣乱，and 捣蛋

I think nciku is great stuff sentence-wise and audio-wise.For deeper understanding I like to consult the depth and clearness of Wordnet to check the semantics of words. A good tool for this is WordNet 3.0 Vocabulary Helper. Another really interesting tool lists specific coocurrences of words and tackles them as left and right coocurrences: corpora.informatik.uni-leipzig.de. And also: Chinese (GB) Wordnet Recently there was only the Academia Sinica Big5 variant.

Ole

[LaoWai]

Have tired numerous times over the last few days to register at nciku, without luck. The system of having to get a verification code, valid only for an hour, is confusing. I type in all the registration material and keep the page open. Then when I get the verification code from my email box and enter it on the registration page, the user name etc. are "invalid." Anyone have any hints on navigating this registration nightmare?

[randall_flagg]

Wow! Been using NCIKU for some time now, never even noticed the pictures! I don't think I'll ever forget 苟合！

[adrianlondon]

I don't think I'll ever forget 苟合！

Wow, that's pretty hot. All I need now are hundreds of other hot images linked to words and my Mandarin will improve no end ;)

[jbradfor]

I need to wait until I go home and then type in all the dirty words I know and see what comes up. "But honey, I'm just trying to learn more Chinese!" I think there's been a couple recently on Random Word of the Day that should fit the bill.

[yersi]

Nciku is good but it's really annoying that they don't support traditional characters yet. Even if you switch to the trad characters version of their site you can only search in simplified.

[anonymoose]

I really don't understand what the site developers are playing at by including those pictures. They aren't really appropriate for such a site. I mean, I don't object to that kind of stuff being on the internet - if you don't like it then simply don't look - but in this case, I fail to see what value it adds to the site. I just came across the innocuous word 断言 (link), [admin note: Not safe for work, or anyone who doesn't like nudity] and I cannot fathom the relevance of the picture on that page.

Edited March 29, 2009 at 01:10 PM by anonymoose
typo corrected

[imron]

I fail to see what value it adds to the site.

From their tag-line: nciku, More than a dictionary

[roddy]

That is somewhat bizarre, have added a note to the link.

[imron]

Maybe they're aiming for balance. They had two almost naked guys for 苟合, and so now they put in the topless woman to even things out.

[HashiriKata]

Maybe they're aiming for balance. They had two almost naked guys for 苟合, and so now they put in the topless woman to even things out.

My laptop is refusing to work with nciku at the moment, maybe it's a kind of protest. Unfortunately, I can't see any of the exciting photos referred to

[Guest realmayo]

I guess someone -or some programme- just searched Getty for "assertive" & shoved in one of the first images that came up.

[roddy]

I'm guessing some bored man leafed through pages and pages of images until they found one of a semi-naked lady.

[imron]

I guess someone -or some programme- just searched Getty for "assertive" & shoved in one of the first images that came up.

That's probably a good bet, considering the file names are all ***_getty_***, in fact, realmayo FTW (NSFW warning: same picture as on nciku, but from stock photography site getty images). First keyword? Assertiveness

But errr, it didn't take me pages and pages to find it

[roddy]

Yeah, but if you search 'assertiveness' it's nowhere near the first page - I went three back and there was no sign of it.

Ah, but you can limit your search to 'women, 20-24 years'. Perhaps it remembered your preferences, Imron?

I'm going to drop ChouDoufu a line, I think we need to know what their image selection policy is.

[imron]

or assertive woman portrait, or any one of a number of other innocuous terms