Pleco: best dictionary for beginners

[ralphmat123]

Hi there,

 

I'm a complete beginner to learning Chinese (Mandarin) and I've started downloading some apps on my phone to help me learn and one app that I keep hearing about is Pleco which is supposed to be the best Chinese-English dictionary app.

 

However, I am unsure about some of it's features and I haven't been able to find the answers to my questions on their website, so I thought I'd ask here.

 

On the dictionary, it has several options in the search bar and it lets you choose between 'PLC', 'CC' and 'NWP'. I think I am right in saying that these are different dictionaries and Pleco allows you to access them all? Because when you use the different dictionaries, you do get quite different results on which words come up.

 

Is there one dictionary that is better for beginners? i.e. more simplified and comes up with the most common word rather than long definitions etc?

 

Any help would be greatly appreciated and if you have any other ideas of apps or anything that are good for learning Chinese, please just let me know.

 

Thanks in advance!  

[lechuan]

Tuttle Learner's Chinese-English Dictionary is the best dictionary on Pleco for beginners. All words are useful, have example, sentences, and gives the meanings of characters in multi-character words.

[mikelove]

Sorry you couldn't find your answers on our website - you might also check our discussion forums at plecoforums.com since there's a lot more Pleco-specific discussion available there.

 

It sounds from your post like you're on Android and like you're mainly looking for help with English-to-Chinese - is that correct? And from the dictionary selection it sounds like you've either downloaded a demo version of our Basic Bundle or already purchased it - which is it?

 

Anyway, regarding your first question, these are indeed different dictionaries - the first two are Chinese-to-English and the third is English-to-Chinese. So if you type in an English word, the results you get from PLC and CC are actually full-text searches of Chinese-to-English dictionaries (we find words that contain whatever you typed in in their definitions and then sort them by frequency + relevance); NWP is a English-to-Chinese dictionary and so will generally be a more reliable bet for looking up English words. So of those three dictionaries, NWP is probably the one you'll want to use for English lookups.

 

If you need help configuring Pleco to default to NWP for English searches, let me know. We also support merging results from multiple dictionaries in a single search - that's what's happening with those [C] and [E] icons you might be seeing.

 

If you're not happy with NWP and are looking for another good English-to-Chinese dictionary for beginners, the best one of those we offer is probably the Oxford Chinese Dictionary, which is currently only on iOS but will be out on Android shortly; we also have another very strong one from Tuttle (makers of the excellent C-E dictionary lechuan mentions) coming soon both to iOS and Android. In the meantime, the Pocket Oxford Chinese Dictionary and ABC English-Chinese Dictionary are two other good ones to look at. You can download and browse through entries in demo versions of all of our dictionaries through the "Add-ons" screen. (and if you are in fact unhappy with NWP and have already purchased it, contact support and we'll be happy to help you with a replacement or refund)

[ralphmat123]

Thanks for getting back to me.

Yes I have it on Android and it's just a trial version.

I assume C and E mean Chinese and English in the icons?

It just seems very complicated to me compared to other dictionary apps I've had in the past but I suppose Chinese is a bit more complicated!

As I am a beginner I want a dictionary that gives Pinyin and the symbols and pronunciation which is not too complex because I am a complete beginner.

[mikelove]

It is a bit complicated, yes - the complexity of Chinese certainly doesn't help matters (don't need to deal with multiple input methods for an English dictionary) but also in general it's a very competitive category relative to most other languages and people tend to pile on new features for that reason; on several occasions now we've seen other apps start out with very minimal / clean user interfaces and then gradually add on more buttons / options / etc until they end up looking even more complicated than our app.

 

We've streamlined the interface quite a lot in our new beta version, though, so if you don't mind the occasional bug / bit of lag you can go to http://plecoforums.com/threads/pleco-for-android-3-1-beta-1.4063/ to download and try that out - pares back a lot of buttons / options compared to our current app and (at least going from the reactions we've seen to a similar recent redesign of our iOS app) makes our software generally a lot more approachable than it was before. That should be out officially soon once we've gotten all of the bugs out.

 

Anyway, for now here's what I'd suggest you do to streamline things and get up and running with a good E-C dictionary:

 

a) Go into the Pleco "Add-ons" screen, go to the pages for the NWP, ABC English-Chinese and Pocket Oxford dictionaries in turn, and for each of them, click on the "download demo version" button (if it's not already downloaded), then tap on the "Browse Dictionary Now" button. That will let you scroll through a list of all of the entries in the dictionary, with the first few thousand definitions visible - flip through those for some common words and that should give you a very good idea of the differences between dictionaries.

 

b) If you decide you want to buy one of those dictionaries, do so; if not, proceed to step c).

 

c) This one's a little awkward: go into the Pleco "Settings" screen, "Manage Dictionaries," tap on each dictionary in turn (in both the Chinese and English tabs), and turn on the "skip over on button tap" option. This will mean that you'll no longer see those separate CC/PLC/NWP/etc dictionary listings, but just a single C or E. Also, if you purchased an English dictionary make sure that it's positioned on the top of the English screen and drag it there if not.

 

That should leave you with a setup where you have the English dictionary you want and don't generally have to fiddle around with dictionary switching anymore otherwise.

[hedwards]

I'd recommend Pleco, but as far as paper dictionaries go, I'd recommend McGraw-Hill's Chinese Dictionary and Guide to 20,000 Essential Words: A New Method for Non-Native Speakers to Look Up the 2,000 Most Commonly Used Characters in Chinese.

 

It's probably the easiest dictionary for beginners to look characters up with other than an automated system like Pleco.

[mikelove]

Not familiar with that one - do you find Broken Marks more efficient than a traditional radical lookup system? (looks like it's very similar to the stroke-based indexes seen in other dictionaries, but they have an interesting way of presenting it and I also like the pared-back number of initial stroke options)

[hedwards]

The main difference is that any stroke that bends by 90 degrees or more is considered to be broken and thus counted as multiple strokes. They also use the upper left most stroke for the categorization. So, you look up the upper left stroke, then you look down the list to the appropriate number of strokes and most of the time you wind up with the correct character.

 

So, with 口 you would traditionally be expected to just know the radical, and to know that it's 3 strokes rather than the 4 that it looks like. Under the the section for a vertical stroke and 4 total strokes. Obviously, that's a simple example, for things like 请 it's probably more helpful.

 

Personally, it's my backup method in cases where Pleco doesn't work. I mostly use it with characters that aren't picking up or were handwritten as Pleco doesn't really handle those yet. And it's often times useful when I can't quite read the font as I can guess a bit about what the initial stroke is and how many strokes.

 

At this point, I'm not aware of any perfect method, but I've found the broken strokes method to be far more realistic than the traditional one with radicals. Mainly because it's always a bit of a guess as to which radical they're using and precisely how many strokes the character has. If there's 3 radicals and several possible stroke numbers it can become time consuming very quickly to look a character up.

[ralphmat123]

Thanks a lot to everyone for your help!

Xièxie

[ralphmat123]

Hi Mike. Just downloaded the Pleco beta and like you said it is a lot more streamlined and similar to the version I have on my ipad. The only thing I think is a bit annoying is the handwriting mode

When I draw a symbol it automatically enters the stroke I just did into the search bar so by the time I've finished drawing the rest of the symbol it and have selected the correct symbol from the list, I have to go back and delete all the other symbols it inserted.

If this could be corrected for the new version that would be gream

Thaanks again for all your help!

[mikelove]

@hedwards - thanks; it does sound a lot more user-friendly than a radical table, particularly for beginners since the 口 / 水 / etc stroke divisions are decidedly non-obvious.

 

@ralphmat123 - could you let me know which model of phone you have, which OS version it's running, and whether or not you're using a custom keyboard (SwiftKey or whatever)? This sounds like a bug - a couple of keyboards keep asserting themselves in the input field even when they're hidden and this must be one that we're not checking for properly.

 

Also, could you try enabling the "Alternate Method" option under "Keyboard" in Settings / Input Methods? That (essentially) activates the same trick that we use to fix other keyboards that we know are problematic - make it think that the search bar is a password field and hence that text should be accepted as typed and not mucked around with. (we would do that all the time but in a few keyboards it actually makes things worse)

 

EDIT: BTW, since you have an iPad, if you end up deciding to purchase any Pleco add-ons it would be best to buy them on that instead of on your Android phone; at the moment, it's very easy to activate items purchased on iOS on an Android device too (http://www.pleco.com/androidxfer.html) but it's much more complicated to activate items purchased on Android on iOS.

[xuexiansheng]

@mikelove

I love Pleco, I bought the super bundle and the gudaihanyu extra dictionaries on my iPad2. It runs wonderfully and I use it all the time when I'm studying. I own a Android (Samsung Galaxy S2) phone and just use the free version for when I'm walking around town and need to look something up. Can I use my registration to unlock my full bundle on two devices: 1 iOS and 1 Andriod?

The info on the forums seemed like you could only 'transfer' the registration, but it also said on http://www.pleco.com/android.html

 

 

Transferring from iOS / Windows Mobile / Palm OS

See this page for instructions on migrating a previously-purchased Pleco license for iPhone / iPod / iPad / Windows Mobile / Palm to Android. You can actually transfer an iOS license to Android and continue using it on iOS

 

 

Thanks and I love your product!

[mikelove]

Yes - the "transfer" language is a bit misleading, it's only a transfer if it was originally purchased on Palm or Windows Mobile; copies originally purchased on iPhone/iPad can still be used on iOS even after you transfer them to Android.

[xuexiansheng]

@mikelove

 

Excellent! I'll get to have the full version available on both platforms, thanks.  

[xuexiansheng]

Just got a new phone, transferred my iOS purchase of Pleco easily and quickly to my new Android phone. Thanks! 

[ParkeNYU]

Pleco is the finest dictionary application that I've ever used for any language. When I was living in Japan during the summer of 2007, I had to purchase a rather expensive electronic dictionary in Akihabara. Now that I'm in China in 2015, I have the luxury of a free offline application on my mobile phone that does the same thing! My favourite aspect of Pleco is that I am able to customise it exactly to my liking. Provided below is a sample of something that I challenge you to find in any other mobile dictionary application: custom tone colours, Mandarin Phonetic Symbols, and automatic conversion to traditional characters, with everything unwanted hidden away!

 

I only wish that there were an option to hide the tone number buttons that float atop the pop-up keyboard...

 

 

(CLICK TO ENLARGE)

[OneEye]

Pleco is the finest dictionary application that I've ever used for any language.

 

Agreed. There still isn't anything even in the same league for Japanese, at least that I know of, despite the better quality and breadth of material available for Japanese in general.

[mikelove]

@ParkeNYU - thank you very much!

 

Re the tone numbers, the problem basically is that we need a row there anyway for the handwriting/radical/english buttons (and a few other things we're planning in the future) - in our old app we had a row of buttons below the search bar instead that only handled input method switching and didn't even cover tones (tones were in a separate, optional bar) so clutter-wise this seems like an improvement over that.

 

We will probably be adding more customizability to that bar in a future release, though - not sure if you'll be able to get rid of it entirely, but you should at least be able to use the space that's currently occupied by the tone numbers for something more useful.

 

Also, FWIW, I see you're using STHeiti - that's the only 繁体-optimized font option that's built into our app, but a lot of people find it less-than-attractive, and if you feel that way too you can download a free 繁体-optimized version of our built-in XinGothic Chinese font or the similarly-styled Source Han Sans font via the "Add-ons" screen / Features.

 

@OneEye - thanks! (we've literally had people asking us for a Japanese version for a decade now)

[OneEye]

@OneEye - thanks! (we've literally had people asking us for a Japanese version for a decade now)

 

Me among them.   

 

I seem to remember you saying there were no plans for a Japanese version. Is that still the case?

[ParkeNYU]

the problem basically is that we need a row there anyway for the handwriting/radical/english buttons (and a few other things we're planning in the future) - in our old app we had a row of buttons below the search bar instead that only handled input method switching and didn't even cover tones (tones were in a separate, optional bar) so clutter-wise this seems like an improvement over that.

 

I suppose that even if I were to revert to the old arrangement, no space would be saved anyway. In my opinion, the keyboard/radical/handwriting toggle key would be best placed next to the [C] / [E] toggle key (to the right of the search bar). However, I concede that this relocation would truncate the visible space of the search bar, which is also undesirable. However, as you can see in my screenshot, the tone buttons occupy valuable definition space. That being said, I really do cherish the radical search function (I don't use the Pleco handwriting function, however, because iOS already offers one natively).

 

The reason I don't need the tone buttons is that, as you can see in the screenshot below, the 'Dynamic Zhuyin' IME already has tone buttons, and these tone buttons are necessary to shift the keyboard from the 'finals' layer to the 'initials' layer (thus allowing for rapid typing).

 

 

Thank you for recommending the XinGothic TC font (as you can see, I'm using it now). I do have three burning questions though:

 

1) If you can't reasonably offer an option to hide the tone buttons, could you at least display them as [ ¯ ] [ ˊ ] [ ˇ ] [ ˋ ] [ ˙ ] instead of [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] when 'Phonetic system' is set to 'Zhuyin'? After all, these are the symbols that are rendered in the search bar in Zhuyin mode, so they are the most consistent labels. 

2) I am interested in a font that renders the Zhuyin symbol ㄧ vertically. Does Pleco offer a font with this orientation? This symbol is supposed to stand vertically in horizontally flowing lines of text.

3) Would you consider adding an option to display the tone mark ¯ within the dictionary entries in Zhuyin mode? I understand that tone 1 traditionally has no tone mark in Zhuyin, but it is helpful for spacing/kerning in horizontal text. As you can see in my screenshot, this tone mark is indeed displayed in the search bar and understood by the search algorithm (the tone 1 button even yields this tone mark in Zhuyin mode).