Why is Pleco so popular?

[carlo]

廣州話方言詞典 is one of the titles we've licensed from them, actually.

Terrific news, it's probably the best out there at the moment. You guys should be awarded a grant from the HKSAR government (alas, the teaching of Cantonese does not appear to be a policy objective). I'm using the free Cantonese PLC patch and will trust it much more now that I know it was checked by hand by a native speaker.

[markcarter]

Several people have mentioned the importance of ABC dictionary support, so it's worth noting that our very own Hanping Chinese Dictionary Pro also supports both ABC dictionaries (as in-app purchases).  From what I've seen, Pleco and Hanping are the only mobile apps that support ABC. The free version is here.

 

As to the original question, Pleco is clearly a fantastic app with an unparalleled collection of dictionaries and features, all working together seamlessly. Furthermore, it works on both iOS and Android. So it's not surprising that it's popular.

 

Several of our customers use Hanping and Pleco together because our app approaches things a little differently and also includes some features not found elsewhere (clipboard monitoring notifications, homescreen widgets, "dynamic" search results, vertical Zhuyin, links to many external resources such as Hanzicraft, Character Pop, Skritter, YellowBridge etc). Also our add-ons are the cheapest you will find anywhere.  Our Cantonese app is currently the only app with offline CantoDict data. We've also received a lot of positive feedback for our OCR app: Hanping Chinese Camera which you can see a video of here.

 

There are probably about 3 or 4 dictionary apps worth trying out on Google Play. My advice would be to spend an evening playing with them and pick your favourite(s).

[淨土極樂]

With all due respect, I don't think Hanping can even be compared to Pleco. It's just a paid CC-CEDICT front-end (like many others on the Play store) with ABC tacked on. On a smartphone, one would be more wise to just use the nciku website. At least it has Collins and 规范词典, in addition to many, many example sentences.

Pleco even without any of its numerous premium dictionaries and add-ons purchased is already so much more. If offers both its own dictionary (smaller than ABC, but with more example sentences) and CC-CEDICT for free. And it doesn't constantly nag you that feature X is 'pro only'. And yeah, now we can also add the famous 國語辭典 to it, all for free as well.

[roddy]

For the sake of clarity, embermitre is, for anyone who doesn't know, the maker of Hanping.

[wangweijing]

Hi,

As some folks here already mentioned, the flashcard function is definitely outstanding. Although it costs a bit, but it provides great value. That together with the speed and many examples of the dictionary is my reason for using it :-)

[markcarter]

@淨土極樂 You are certainly entitled to your opinion but I can show you thousands of customers who disagree. It's worth noting that the three highest rated Chinese language-learning apps on Google Play are Hanping Chinese Dictionary Pro, Hanping Chinese Camera and Hanping Cantonese Dictionary, so it's quite strange someone would have such a negative view.

It is not true that ABC has been "tacked on" any more than it has on any other dictionary app offering it as an in-app purchase. In fact, I think the screenshots hint at the level of integration by showing entries from both Chinese-English dictionaries on the same page. Under the hood, the level of integration is to the same extent that CC-CEDICT has been integrated.

In fact, "front end" implies there is no content beyond that of the CC-CEDICT data. This is blatantly false. The built-in handwriting recognition alone shows this. And then there is the radicals lookup, not to mention 2000+ audio sounds by a native speaker. Here are some screenshots:

  

First you were talking about the Pro app, and then you switched to the Lite app but pretended they are the same. Of course, the paid app never shows the "Pro only" message. In fact, in the Lite app the "Pro only" message only appears (for about a second) when you try to access a Pro function. It's not a dialog box, so does not interrupt your workflow. You don't even have to wait for it to disappear. If it is "constantly" showing "Pro only" then you must be constantly trying to access Pro features you haven't paid for. Either that, or you are exaggerating.

 

UPDATE 2015: The free version now also includes Chinese handwriting recognition as well as single-syllable audio of a native mandarin speaker (over 2000 sound clips).

Your comment is clearly not fair and I'm wondering why you wrote it. I always welcome constructive feedback and spend a great deal of my time engaging with customers to help make Hanping better. Unfortunately, I cannot derive anything constructive from your (above) criticism of Hanping and I'm even left wondering whether you've even tried the Pro version. If anyone has something to share then I'm very happy to engage with them either publicly or privately, whichever they wish.

If you look at how dictionary apps have progressed over the last 5 or 10 years, it's quite astonishing. This has mostly been down to major improvements in smartphone technology (Android/iOS) making more things possible, but also because of increased competition.

[Sam Fairhall 92]

I use both Anki and Pleco.

Pleco is by far the best when it comes to learning single-word pinyin and characters. (You can purchase an add-on which shows you the stroke order to imitate).

Anki is by the best for sentences - which I've found is crucial to learning Chinese. Learning single characters is dangerous because you are learning it out of context. The problem is cards take so long to produce, which is where i found a solution. If you accompany your studies with 'Chinesepod' lessons, at the end of each lesson you can open the text file in your web browser and all i do is copy and paste the featured sentences into Anki. Probably even faster then Pleco in that sense.

But yes, you need Pleco

[putonghua73]

When I started to learn Chinese, I also used the Anki. But after a month, I deleted it because got really pissed off. It takes an awful lot of time to create the cards and the decks, and you need to do two sets for Chinese-English and English-Chinese! The UI is also not my cup of coffee, so eventually I dropped it. If you have limited free time for studying, you don't want to spend time to create your cards IMO. Pleco is much faster, and that makes it the best flashcard app for me

Anki is good if you have a need for:

• a platform agnostic solution
  agnostic SRS functionality (not just flash-cards)
  specific format for templates
  additional media e.g. image files, video, etc

In all honesty, I found Anki as a solution the equivalent to using a hammer to crack a walnut. Most people inc. myself, stick with what they know; even if it is a sub-optimal decision. Like ZhangKaiRong, I had used Anki because it was my first SRS solution. It was also a monumental PITA because I only required:

1. Flashcard software

2. Dictionary

3. Ability to create flashcards from dictionary definitions

4. Audio

Pleco does all of this simply, efficiently, allowing me to GTD with the minimum of fuss. I spend less time fiddling around with creating flashcards and more time using flashcards as part of my overall study program.

It's that simple.

Plus, Pleco has additional functionality if you need it e.g. OCR. I have used Hanping dictionary for my HTC Android phone. However, I predominantly use my iPad for Chinese - and my phone is for phone-calls and texts.

P.s. You do know that you can add your own sentences to flashcards in Pleco, right? Edit card, click 'Create Custom Card', then add your example sentence. Simple! I had the same concern before I started using Pleco. However, if you need to create a flashcard using a sentence, then Pleco does not have that functionality at present.

[Lu]

Well, to stretch that metaphore: when I needed to crack walnuts, Anki was the free hammer I got and I've been happily cracking walnuts with it for quite a while now. Apparently the hammer I got is a very versatile tool with lots of other functions, but I only need to crack walnuts and it works fine for that. Pleco is giving me half a nutcracker, I'm now finding that there is more that I can get and perhaps then I can crack walnuts with it very well, but at the moment I only have the half nutcracker, which is just not that great a tool.

Making your own flashcards is in my experience actually a great way of learning words. Even apart from the fact that you can costumise the card (and for example include the place you actually found the word in as an example sentence), simply looking up the definition and some examples and typing everything up means you already learned it once, and the repetitions only need to reinforce the knowledge.

But this is just my experience, if others are happier with Pleco, that's great.

[Johnny20270]

I like ANKI but I never create flash cards using the actual app. I always just have my 'decks' it in a simple spread sheet and just load in the CSV file. This way you can correct changes easily (e.g. wrong tone mark), add sentences for Chinesepod, like Sam mentioned.

Spreadsheets are easy to use and very functional, so amending groups of data (e.g. change tag field), finding duplicates etc is a lot easier than using the actual SRS app

As long as the first field is the same, the cards will update correct

The problem with using my spreadsheet approach is you can't add Audio or images

[Manuel]

Pleco = Best money ever spent.

[Yorin]

Pleco is my favourite app for learning Chinese on Android, for all the reasons stated above.

Though there is one thing I can't understand, unless I'm missing something.

I have recently bought the "Text file reader" and "Chinese Text-to-Speech" add-ons, and I

expected I would be able to open a text file with the reader and let it read the whole text

using the text-to-speech engine, to help training my listening comprehension.

It seems though as if text-to-speech is only working for one word at a time. That's been a

little bit of a disappointment to me.

[Sam Fairhall 92]

If you've purchased pleco add-ons on a mobile phone, is there any way of transferring it to a new one? I'm about to change phones and would not like to pay for the software again.

[Yorin]

If you've purchased pleco add-ons on a mobile phone, is there any way of transferring it to a new one? I'm about to change phones and would not like to pay for the software again.

On your old phone, start Pleco, go to "Settings > Manage Registration" and write down your Registration ID. Then start Pleco on your new phone, open the same menu and enter the ID there. Then, open the "Add-ons" menu and tap "Restore In-app Purchases". I sometimes had to close and restart Pleco to make it work, but it basically works fine. I'm using Pleco on my mobile phone and my tablet simultaneously.

[mikelove]

You can expand the reader selection by tap-holding on the |-> button (once for a sentence, twice for a paragraph), after which tapping on the audio button will get TTS to play the entire sentence or paragraph for you.

Full-fledged read-along is supported by our TTS library and should be working soon, it's just proven very tricky on Android because we're trying to synchronize timestamps between the Java-code Android audio playback system and the native-code TTS library. It'll only work with Hui, though, the engine behind Lulu doesn't support reading along at a granularity below the level of entire sentences yet.

Also, you don't need to do "Restore In-App Purchases" if you copy over the Registration ID - the ID itself will bring all of your purchases with it. (this works on iOS as well, but we weren't sure if Apple was OK with that until recently so the labeling / documentation / etc all imply that it doesn't)

[Yorin]

Thanks for the information, I wasn't aware of the "tap-holding on the |-> button" feature!

[roddy]

It's kind of traditional on here that in every Pleco thread someone comes along and says something like "I love Pleco, but I wish I could use it to remote control my pet monkey." And then Mike comes along and says 'Oh, you just need to open up the 'animals' page in the settings module, then click through to 'mammals', then 'primates' and turn on the 'remote control' option. And make sure your monkey's Bluetooth is on."

[Manuel]

LOL

[mikelove]

True, and if we ever took away the pet monkey control feature there'd be a lengthy and passionate thread in our support forums bemoaning its loss.

(actually we have made some progress on this front recently - iOS went from about 400 settings to about 200 for the new update, and of those, 87 relate to OCR and will probably be consolidated into about 20 with next year's OCR redesign)

[li3wei1]

Why didn't anyone tell me I could control my pet monkey with Pleco?