Dictionaries Recommendations for Lingoes

[gougou]

After being unsatisfied with Kingsoft for various reasons (mostly that only the very limited Google version is functioning in Firefox 3), I switched to Lingoes these days. As they have almost 200 dictionaries for Simplified Chinese, I was wondering whether anybody had bothered to try a few and found the ultimate dictionary that has a large amount of words, good explanations and Pinyin?

Is there anything that has more fixed expressions and 成语 than the ones that come preinstalled? I find that for many of those, it still turns up blank.

[Senzhi]

I've thrown Kingsoft out of the window a few years ago already. And I'm very happy with Lingoes.

The dictionaries I use are the Langdao ones:

Langdao E-C Dictionary:

http://www.lingoes.org/en/dictionary/dict_down.php?id=7AB175CC5F622A44A0DECE976AF22A16

Langdao C-E Dictionary:

http://www.lingoes.org/en/dictionary/dict_down.php?id=60705A9F3503084A844B4ABE47E5D62A

So far, they were more than up to my needs. But of course, I'd also be interested in what other forum members use from Lingoes.

[HarryCallahan]

I installed Lingoes recently and am very happy with it. For freeware it's a darn good application.

With the dictionaries my issue was finding one that gives you the pinyin as well as the english definition. As a new learner I really need the pinyin. The only one I've found that does that is the CEDICT Chinese(S) dictionary. Unfortunately that does have 'holes' in it, I'm often finding no matches with it. But then next on my priority list is Langdao C-E dictionary which picks up most terms.

Would like to hear if other people have found pinyin enabled dictionaries.

[gougou]

I get Pinyin from 维科 (I think Vicon in English) and 海词 (I think that one came preinstalled) as well.

EDIT: Oh, and for the record, I ended up installing a whole bunch of dictionaries, among which two 成语 dictionaries, as that seemed to be the only way to cover my needs.

[HarryCallahan]

Yep installed the Vicon dictionary just then and it does have pinyin. The reason I thought CEDICT was one of only a few with it was because that was the only one I found with pinyin in it's description, but Vicon isn't described as having it but does, so I guess you can't go by that.

海词 I can't find either at the site or installed now, but with 2 pinyin enabled dicts it should be enough. If I'm lacking still I'll try and experiment more with the 5 star dicts, might have to find pinyin by trial and error.