How are you guys looking up new words?

[count_zero]

I'm finding it a bit frustrating looking up the meaning of Chinese words

My first port of call is nciku, which is good when it works but has virtually no food vocabulary and is not strong on slang.

Then I turn to iciba.com, which might possibly help.

Then I'll probably do a baidu image search to see if that turns up any clues.

Then I'll put the term into baidu and throw some English words into the search to see if that brings up and bilingual material that can act as a translation.

Then I'll put the term into baidu with 什么意思 after it - if it's slang then maybe some Chinese people have been asking about it.

Then I pretty much give up. Asking a Chinese friend on MSN would be ideal but my friends are working people so I don't want to bother them too much.

[rebor]

I find I usually use Pleco if I have my phone with me, I prefer it to nciku because I'm more used to it. You can purchase different dictionaries for it. There's mdbg, too, if you haven't tried it.

[Shelley]

I always use Pleco. Reasonable price if you get the basic package. You can always add more dictionaries if you need them later. mdbg is great too.

I know I have only repeated what rebor said but thats cos it good advice

[WestTexas]

现代汉语词典

dict.baidu.com

sometimes just google translate.

If those fail, I save it to a file or write it down, then ask a Chinese person later.

[count_zero]

I don't find Google translate terribly useful - If I can't figure out a sentence there's no way it will be able to. Having said that, there have been times it's helped me think about a sentence differently and work out what's going on so it is useful.

Asking a Chinese person is probably often the quickest way. I think I'll try searching around Weibo for people who are studying English. Loads of people are on Weibo these days and there's a chat function so that could work quite well.

[jbradfor]

baidu image search

Have you found better luck with baidu image search or google image search? I always use google, but that's probably only due to habit.

[roddy]

Kind of depends on the source of the words. Generally I'd plug it into Pleco. But if it looks like modern slang or something quite technical I'd just run right to Google and see what I can turn up.

[scoff]

Pleco for general vocab that I'm not sure about. Baidu for almost everything else. 古汉语常用字字典, self-explanatory.

As for google translate, the iphone app came in really handy the other day when some visitors from China were buying OTC medicines to take home. GT did a great job translating all the active ingredients into Chinese. I'd thought it was kind of crap until then.

[count_zero]

"Have you found better luck with baidu image search or google image search? I always use google, but that's probably only due to habit."

That's a good question but I'm afraid I can't give you a good answer. It seems maybe Google images has got better recently for Chinese searches?

Anyway, I think the way to go is tabbed bookmarks. Set up one bookmark folder with nciku, iciba, baidu, Google etc all on tabs and then when Google craps out you have baidu right there just a tab away.

[imron]

For internet searching I usually go with keyworded bookmarks. Then in the address bar I can just type:

cf blah (to search site:chinese-forums.com for blah)

gi cats (to search google images for cats)

n 一个词 (to search nciku for 一个词)

and so on and so on.

[Lu]

For normal words I just don't know: bilingual Xiandai Hanyu Cidian or nciku, whatever I have handy. Wikipedia is useful for some specialized vocabulary, and also for medicine and such. I suppose google translate can do that too, but in wikipedia I can read about the thing a bit as well to be extra sure I have the right stuff.

I usually use google images, I think it is a bit better than baidu images, but baidu works too. Google translate when I know a word but just can't think of it right now. Google together with an English word that should show up close to this unknown term. Baidu zhidao for some slang. I sometimes ask Chinese friends, but when I have taken all these steps already, there is quite a chance that they don't know either.

One other thing that sometimes works is to throw the whole sentence into nciku and see how it parses. Sometimes I search far and wide for a word that turns out to be part of a chengyu and is meaningless on its own.

[lingo-ling]

1. Dr. Eye

2. Wenlin/ABC

3. Google (with English keywords), Google Images, Wikipedia, and other online sources

4. Ask a native speaker (whose response often includes "Who wrote this garbage?")

5. Ask the client

[smurese]

If all the things mentioned above fail you, then I often try Jukuu.com (if you haven't already).

It's basically a huge database of sentences and has their English translations - multiple examples that include your keyword will paint you a good picture of how the word is used. (MDBG uses material from Jukuu to a certain extent.)