Parts of Speech Chinese Online Dictionary

[taiwanshaun]

I've used a lot of Chinese dictionaries online.

Here are a couple of my favorites:

http://www.nciku.com

http://tw.dictionary.yahoo.com

http://www.xuezhongwen.net/chindict/chindict.php

But are there any websites/dictionaries/programs/utilities/etc that will also show you the part of speech in addition to the definition? For me, it would be nice way to quantify everything in terms of grammar.

For example:

If I looked up 熊貓 (Panda)

It would show something like this:

> Noun， Large black-and-white herbivorous mammal of bamboo forests of China and Tibet

> Measure Word: 隻

Thanks!!!!!!!!!!!

[trevelyan]

You may find the Popup Chinese Chinese dictionary useful. It tags every entry (definition) by part of speech. There are occasional errors, but they are getting cleaned up pretty rapidly. The entire database is open source and may be downloaded here as well.

[Don_Horhe]

The Contemporary Standard Chinese Dictionary entry Nciku provides for most of its content does say which part(s) of speech the given word belongs to.

[tooironic]

Wenlin. Not online though, nor free. However nothing else rivals it (IMO).

Wiktionary also distinguishes POS, however the Chinese entries are still very much underdeveloped.

[abcdefg]

One of the things I like about this forum is that it lets me learn about new study tools. For a long time all I had was a hammer, so everything got treated like a nail. By now I have assembled a little toolkit and can usually select the appropriate implement for each task.

Though it isn’t exactly what the Original Poster was after, he might want to have a look at Jukuu (www.jukuu.com.) By no means is it an “all in one” and it differs quite a bit from the robust "real" dictionaries already mentioned here such as Wenlin, NCIKU, Popup, and MDBG.

Though it does give the part of speech, where it excels is in giving current common uses of the word being searched. I like the fact that it gives lots of real-world sample sentences and even has a small table of "frequent preceding adverbs or adjectives." It also has a table of "frequent following nouns" that I haven't found as useful thus far.

I used it earlier today to tease out once again the difference between 聊天 and 谈话 in an article I was reading and was impressed yet again that it made the task easy and increased my understanding of how the language really works in a practical way. That's a pretty simple example, but it works just as well in more complex situations.

Bear in mind that I’m a recent graduate of just memorizing vocabulary lists at the end of each chapter of one or another textbook and remain quite awed by the quantum leap such resources as this provide. Wish I had known about it a year ago, though it may be "old hat" to everyone else.

Have a look at this example for yourself, and be sure to note the handy pie chart on the right:

http://www.jukuu.com/search.php?q=%E8%81%8A%E5%A4%A9

http://www.jukuu.com/search.php?q=%E8%B0%88%E8%AF%9D

I would be interested in hearing what more advanced learners think about this tool.

[tooironic]

jukuu.com is indeed awesome, though it is by no means error-free. Like dict.cn, although it has a huge amount of data, it is hardly a reliable source, and everything you see on there should be taken with a grain of salt. But, then, arguably all bilingual dictionary resources should be treated as such.

You say it gives "real-world sample sentences", but this isn't always the case. From what I can see, dictionary and text-book example sentences (some of which are useful, others awful) make up a very large portion of the corpora and are mixed in "real-life" texts. I have no idea which forms the majority of data though. Nonetheless, it is undoubtedly an amazing tool, and a great place to start. Moreoever, it *sometimes* distinguishes POS like the OT would have wanted.

[abcdefg]

You say it gives "real-world sample sentences", but this isn't always the case.

I see. You're right. I looked at Jukuu again as well as at dict.cn (my other "real world" source) and they aren't nearly as authoritative as I had thought. Previously I just assumed the example sentences were from clipped from newspaper stories or magazines. Can't put that old salt shaker away quite yet.

[creamyhorror]

I like the translations of fiction/literary works that you get on Jukuu. The sentences aren't too long, and the structures aren't too complicated to grasp easily. The less technical the source, the easier, basically.

The pie charts are really nice, too.