Pleco: best dictionary for beginners

[hedwards]

I agree with the praise, one of my biggest regrets about my time in China was cheaping out on the phone so that I didn't have access to Pleco. It would have made things so much more convenient at times when I was trying to learn. If I asked for a word they could just type it into the phone and I could have it made into a flashcard immediately, and more importantly, if I saw a word or character on a sign I could more quickly look it up.

 

On a side note, is it possible to synchronize flashcards across installs? I've got a tablet and a phone and it would be nice to be able to synchronize them as sometimes I don't want to be working off of my phone.

[ralphmat123]

Hi, so as I started this topic I thought I would give a little update as it's been several months now.

So I purchased the full version of Pleco on my IPhone and I am really pleased with all of the features and I've downloaded all the extras like pronunciation and ocr etc and it is a really good dictionary.

My only slight complaint is that I find the dictionary slightly too complicated in terms of usage and layout. I'm used to the more basic dictionary apps like Collins or Oxford when you just type in the word you need and it gives you the options on one page with examples and context in brackets. This is what I feel is missing from Pleco. What I mean is, say I wanted to know what the word "shut" was in Chinese, if you type "shut" into Pleco it just brings up so many words but It doesn't reallly give a lot of context at times or it gives quite obscure words and meanings before it gives more everyday ones, which seems strange to me. "Shut" has so many meanings ie "Shut a door" "Shut up" "shut/close a book" etc...

I actually downloaded a more basic Oxford Chinese dictionary as well to help with this issue and I actually use both dictionaries in conjunction. I've added screenshots of both dictionaries to more accurately display my point.

However I still want to say that Pleco is a very good dictionary and is one of the best I've used, and I just think if it could be streamlined and more context and disambiguation could be given, it would be amazing.

Any questions about Pleco then please ask

[Altair]

 

I actually downloaded a more basic Oxford Chinese dictionary as well to help with this issue and I actually use both dictionaries in conjunction. I've added screenshots of both dictionaries to more accurately display my point.

 

I think you made a good decision; however, I think you may be unaware that Pleco has two different English search functions if you have installed an English-Chinese dictionary.  One function is the normal search of entry headwords.  The other is a full text search that includes instances of the English word that appear even within the definition of other English words.

 

The second screen shot you show in your post has a rounded blue box with an "E" in it near the top right.  When this box has a white interior and a blue "E," it is a full text search finding all instances of the word throughout the dictionary text.  On the other hand, when the box is solid blue, with a white "E," it is a normal search of headwords.  Most people will normally want the latter, rather than the former.  Just tap the box to switch between the two.

 

One of the strengths of Pleco is also a weakness.  It has numerous functions and numerous modes to suit almost any learning method; however, this flexibility makes many of the features less than obvious.  It has taken me time to figure it out how to use it most efficiently for my ordinary purposes.

 

As an aside, I should say that I really, really like Pleco.  Using the Reader function, I suddenly went from decoding Chinese to reading Chinese, which made all the difference in terms of motivation to engage with the language more.  I think most learners should be made aware of this possibility in their learning, regardless of the tools they use or end up using.

[mikelove]

@OneEye - yes, still the case. Honestly along with coding time the money + licenses are a big problem - would be very expensive to build up a sizable inventory of Japanese dictionaries and would take a while to build that business up to where we'd make the money back. But if we ever take on a bunch of VC money Japanese would probably go much higher on our to-do list.

 

@ParkeNYU - that makes sense, yes.

 

1) Certainly ought to be doable; we already adjust that row to 123456 if Cantonese is enabled, only question would be what we do with that 6 slot if Zhuyin is enabled as well.

 

2) Oddly enough, it looks like the only fonts we currently have that do that are the simplified-optimized Kai / Song / Xing add-on ones; we could use another character like 〡 instead, though.

 

3) Seems reasonable, IIRC we defaulted to that behavior at one point and a lot of people complained.

 

@hedwards - thank you! Sync is currently only possible on iOS devices (via iCloud - enable in Settings / Flashcards) but we're working on a cross-platform solution; bit difficult because we can't really rely on any third-party file storage services since most of them are at least intermittently blocked in China.

 

@ralphmat123 - thanks! Very happy to hear it's working well for you.

 

As @Altair indicates, we support that same sort of search via English-Chinese dictionaries; most of them are paid add-ons though we do have one very simple (no Pinyin) one available for free (the LDC English-Chinese wordlist). We're also working on some ways to improve the quality + usefulness of those full-text English results you're seeing now.

 

@Altair - thanks! Quite right about options - are there any specific ones that you wish in retrospect we'd enabled by default / done a better job of drawing your attention to?

 

I'm very glad to hear the reader has been helpful (that's pretty much exactly what we're hoping it will do, bridge the gap between decoding and reading).

[Altair]

 

@Altair - thanks! Quite right about options - are there any specific ones that you wish in retrospect we'd enabled by default / done a better job of drawing your attention to?

For me Pleco is very much worth the money.  I would give it an A, or 94-95 out of 100 points.  The 5-6 points I am denying to Pleco amount to annoyances.

 

The annoyances:

 

From a beginner's standpoint, I think Pleco is a little bit overwhelming and sometimes seems to be oriented more around features than around tasks.  Many options are presented without always explaining why they may or not be important or what their relevance might be.  I would still rate these as annoyances because after playing around for a while, you can generally figure things out.

 

I just looked again at the Tutorials, and they seem to be much better than I recall.  I think an initial listing of basic learner functions or tasks that Pleco facilitates is still missing, however.

 

I wonder if having optional menus with more descriptive choices might be more helpful.  I discovered the English-Chinese switch button by accident and never fully internalized the existence of the text search option.  Even the term "full-text search" is not really very clear.  From the perspective of a long-term user, none of these are issues for me.  I may take a few more clicks to do what I want, but that is okay.

 

Probably the most important thing I would emphasize is that Pleco has to be explored to get access to the full functionality and to understand what it is doing.  There are many ways to do similar tasks, but it is probably more important to keep making clear that the functionality actually exists even within the program.

 

My skills are widely inconsistent, but I think the only functionality that I found and still find missing in Pleco is access to character etymologies.  I miss that from Wenlin, but have found work-arounds.

 

 

Another suggestion I would add is to explore providing "readers" or sample documents described by level as part of the Add-Ons.  Finding appropriate documents as a beginner is particularly difficult and gets only slightly better at the intermediate level.  If you provided such for US$10 or less, I think many people would be very interested.  Using Pleco to read them would be an incredible encouragement.

 

If I had to review Pleco for beginners, here is what I would say.

 

Pleco is a tool that integrates dictionary information in one place with tools to accelerate reading and character memorization.

 

The integration is similar to other on line tools, in linking quick access to character meanings, pinyin, pronunciation, composition, stroke order, and usage examples, but can be married to excellent dictionaries to improve the functionality.  All Chinese dictionaries have inaccuracies and misleading entries.  Having multiple dictionaries helps greatly in sorting through things like the exact meaning of many words or the scope of their usage.  Having larger or more specialized dictionaries can give you access to names of Chinese organizations, literary figures and their works, names of historical or geographic importance, surnames, and chengyu.

 

Where Pleco begins to really sing is in allowing you quick integrated access to looking up words and characters even in example sentences and in Chinese-Chinese dictionaries.  Focusing your learning around actual examples and usage gets you to engage much more with the Chinese itself, rather than just relying on short English definitions.  You get easy reading and grammar practice just by looking stuff up.

 

Reading Chinese in the dictionary section or in independent texts is accelerated by being integrated with the pop-up dictionary functions, but also by providing default word segmentation to quickly show you different possibilities.  Just pointing out likely chengyu (four-character phrases) is a great time saver.  You can also easily change the default segmentation whenever the dictionary's choice does not seem appropriate.  Between copying and pasting to the Clipboard, saving texts, and direct web access through the built-in browser, you can begin to tackle extended Chinese texts much earlier than otherwise.

 

Having integrated flash cards will also be useful to those who like studying that way.  I, myself, do not do so and so do not use that function.  I do, however, sometimes use Skritter, particularly for the possibility of learning physically to write characters and for its apparently greater functionality.

[mikelove]

Thanks for this very detailed reply!

 

You're quite right about options - the problem really is in isolating which ones people actually want; we're constantly getting requests for an "expert mode" but there are relatively few options that are unpopular enough that we can put them there. We are working on a better inline help system for settings, though.

 

With the full-text issue specifically, in (probably) 3.3 or 3.4 we're planning to merge the two E-C searches together by default; basically you'll see a list of English words and phrases and if you tap on one of them you'll be able to view both dictionary definitions for them and a list of Chinese words containing them. We sort-of do this now via the WORDS tab accessible when you view an E-C dictionary entry - all we'll basically adding to that is that words that only exist in full-text indexes will now come up too. (the one tricky aspect of this is how to handle multi-word phrases, which we're still working on) We think this will be a win for most users (even for full-text it's faster to tap on a partially completed English word than to finish typing it) but we plan to keep the current full-text mode around as an option too, at least initially.

 

(and right there is why we have so many options - people get used to certain workflows and want a way to keep them even after updates; "Sort Chinese by Pinyin" in Settings / Search Engine for example is to my mind a totally unnecessary option but we had to add it anyway after numerous users complained about the frequency sorting of results in 3.0)

 

Re etymology: we're working on that one, actually - hopefully we'll have more specific details soon.

 

Re graded readers: we're in the process of trying to license a couple of those, actually (@character's excellent post on the subject provided several helpful leads), though we're also considering whether this might be something we can open up to other companies; supplying every type of book that somebody might like to read is beyond what we can reasonably do, and even Apple's policies allow for sales of content like books outside of their store (this is why Kindle has an iPhone app), so if we could provide an easy public interface for others to distribute books through our system we think that might serve our users much better than a few Pleco-supplied titles would.

[ParkeNYU]

Could you explain how certain fonts are optimised for either traditional or simplified character sets? Also, is there a way to show the radical and residual stroke count for a given character in the Unihan database (or in another section)? Lastly, can the Unihan Japanese pronunciations be displayed as Kana instead of all-caps Romaji?

Thanks!

[roddy]

Ralph, thanks very much for posting some follow-up, greatly appreciated! And thanks also to Mike for making so much time for the site. 

[mikelove]

@ParkeNYU - Ah, that's one of the most irritating issues in modern Chinese computing actually.

 

Basically, there are certain characters that are drawn differently in different regions but share the same character code: 骨 "bone" is the most common example, the box inside of the top part is generally drawn on the bottom right corner in traditional and the bottom left corner in simplified. Since there's only a single computer code point for that character, the character will appear the same way in a particular font regardless of whether the text you're reading is in traditional or simplified. (this is in contrast to many other traditional character changes - even a lot of very subtle ones like 别/別 have two separate code points)

 

Hence, if you're learning traditional characters, in addition to making sure that dictionary headwords / examples / etc are in traditional you'll also want to use a traditional character font so that characters like 骨 are rendered correctly for you.

 

For radical + stroke count, add the RSUnicode or RSKangXi field to your UNI data and the number after the . is the stroke count. (we're working on putting this somewhere more prominent)

 

No support for Kana in UNI at the moment but that's a good idea, thanks.

 

@roddy - heh, I've been coming here since before Pleco even had our own forums :-)