Best Chinese-English And English-Chinese Dictionary For Iphone

[nazreal]

Hello everyone,

I'm just wandering what the best dictionary for the iPhone is. I've already got 'Qing Wen' which isn't bad but then I've heard lots of people use 'Pleco' - thoughts?

Thanks!

nazreal

[Yezze]

I have Pleco and iCED. Those were both free, and they do what i need them to day. iCED is huge (300+ mb i think), has lots of stuff.

[flippant]

I have the full Pleco package, and it's awesome. Kind of expensive, but as close to exhaustive as you can get.

[nazreal]

Hi,

Yeh I just downloaded the free package for Pleco and it seems really good - bit difficult to get hold of some characters without totally scrolling for ages (but then again, that's the Chinese lingo for you...) but at £29.99 for the whole thing? Pricey....mmm I think I will indulge in some inner turmoil before buying it!

Thanks though!

nazreal

[Xuesheng123]

I have the Pleco app on my iPhone, and without paying for it I still can use the demo interface for their Character Recognition addon. It's pretty useful for trying to recall the components and stroke order of a character you are thinking of. Might check out the full package soon.

[flippant]

I paid much more for it. It was called the "Complete Bundle" and was like $90 with an educational discount.

Anyway. Using the reader on the iPad is brilliant when reading difficult stuff. It has to be the most used piece of software on my iPhone as well.

Though I did unfortunately shell out for the ABC dictionary in iCED as well (the ABC is the one Wenlin uses; more exhaustive than CC, but without all the modern stuff).

[nazreal]

Oh wow! The Educational discount is massive. good job I'm actually eligible although I do think they ought to do a check thing with an email address or something! Otherwise won't people be just nabbing the discounts all the time?

So what's the difference with all the dictionary types? To be honest, when I studied Chinese years ago, I only used a paper 'Pocket version' (but still chunky) Oxford Chinese-English dictionary. Now that I'm going to be studying Chinese in Beijing this Autumn, I'm really hoping for a good dictionary and better still, an electronic one (on iPhone) but which one?

[taijidan]

Go with pleco dude - it's really awesome. It's really cool dictionary, but also much more with the built in reader and integrated flashcard's make's it a really powerful language learning tool. You also have things like stroke order animation and the audio.

Regarding the diciontaries you can get within pleco. For Chinese-English the one's I use the most are ABC and CC-CEDICT. I find ABC is generally more compresensive and has good coverage of chengyu. Sometimes ABC will have lot's of different meanings for one word, while CC-CEDICT will only have, but it will be the most common usage. Also CC-CEDICT is good for modern words things like car brands, celebrity names, internet lingo etc.

There is also a nice radical dictionary you can download for free.