Lingoes "Issues"

[skillphiliac]

Hey there,

My attention just recently was directed towards "Lingoes", so I gave it a try and, well, paired with my favourite dictionaries, it really satisfies my needs concerning Chinese.

Yet, there are some things bothering me, and I couldn't google myself out of either.

First of all, certain words, for reasons unknown to me, just seem to be inseperable. For instance "好啊". No matter whether I hover over "好” or "啊“, I will always get the same result, namely "No matches found...". Should I mark either of those two characters, and, again, put my curser over one of them, it delivers, both the first and the last depending on which I am pointing. While this may work, it sure is tedious. Have I left an option unnoticed? Am I doing something wrong? It really bothers me... for obvious reasons.

The second thing would be the following:

Sometimes, when confronted with - at least apparently - undecipherable passages of text, I like to get higher ground by copying the whole sentence to the clipboard and pasting it to a compatible dictionary. Mostly I use MDBG's, and it normally works pretty good. I am able to grasp most of what I am trying to translate.

Now for those of you who should not be familiar with the concept I am relying on (yes, it may be hard to believe): MDBG takes the whole text and tries to seperate it into smaller units, each representing the longest composition of characters possible according to the dictionary. Example: "我不用介绍我" is divided into four parts, resulting in "我_不用_介绍_我", and for every one of them the translation is given.

Now, is this possible with Lingoes? When I am marking a segment of my text, it usually doesn't provide anything unless there is a word matching the section I marked. If so, how? I really would miss it, otherwise it would be perfect (alright, an appendix showing me the stroke order of single characters would even improve the inherent awesomeness).

Either way, thanks for reading my wall of text and replying with delightful answers (bweeze!).

[anon6969]

I'd like advice about this too.

[holger]

Yes... i was asking the developer about this problem some weeks ago but as the last times before, never received an answer:

the fastest way around that is to click into the headline, delete the character you dont want and press enter.

[holger]

which makes me wonder about the Legal status of Lingoes.

See Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lingoes

Criticism 2nd point

Is Lingoes legal? Would you install it in your public Library or cip-pool?

[holger]

Strange to see that no one else seems interested in this issue though I guess that quite a lot of you out there must be using this software. Sorry for resurrecting this thread - It'll be the last time, I promise.

Lingoes seems to work fine in Windows 7. Now i'm on a iMac snow leopard with vmware fusion and Win7 in Unity mode (rocks my socks off) But Lingoes only works in Windows Programs, though it happened a few times that it popped up in the Mac Firefox, no idea how to explain or reproduce this phaenomenon. Copy & paste between these two Systems in Unity mode is working fine. Does anybody work with Lingoes on a mac?

Oh yes another thing.. I had that fantastic dictionary "Oxford advanced learner's English-Chinese" dictionary in traditional Chinese from Lingoes but I forgot to backup the ld2 file. Now after reinstalling the whole system only had access to the already integrated ldx file with the same name but can't manage to install it again. The point is actually that Lingoes does no longer offer that specific dictionary for download any more. My guess is because it would be too helpful and too many people would learn Chinese in too short time which could have a destabilizing effect on somebodys great harmony...

.. I really wish I had that dictionary back

Edited January 16, 2010 at 11:28 PM by holger

[skillphiliac]

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