Which entry? - Pleco

[mackie1402]

There are times when it's difficult to explain a word in English to my students, so I usually opt for putting it into Pleco and getting a translation for them.

 

The biggest problem I find is when I put in the English word I get a huge range of Chinese entries.

 

What do you guys do to make sure it's the right translation? Especially if it's on the spot without time to research.

[abcdefg]

What do you guys do to make sure it's the right translation? Especially if it's on the spot without time to research.

 

I don't think you can ever be sure you have picked right translation without already knowing both languages well. This method sounds like it is essentially flawed and bound to sow seeds of confusion among your students. Need to figure out a different approach.

 

Is there a way you could put the puzzling (English) word into additional (English) context for your students to make the meaning more clear, instead of crossing from one language into another?

 

My best Chinese teachers do something like that for me when I'm stumped. They maintain a Chinese teaching environment while we attempt to get over the hurdle.

[mackie1402]

I agree keeping the teaching environment the same and using more context is best. That really helped me in our Chinese classes at the university here. However some of the students aren't at the level where they can understand that much, and make explaining some adverbs pretty difficult for them.

Another example is when I need a word at work. Every day communication is not a problem in the office, but as soon as I throw in a word I just looked up for a specific reason, their faces go blank. In the end I always describe what I mean, then ask them how to say it.

[abcdefg]

In the end I always describe what I mean, then ask them how to say it.

 

That sounds like a good approach. Might it work with your students?

 

(I'm not an English teacher. Maybe someone who is can help you more.)

[mikelove]

TBH, if you'll pardon the marketing pitch, that's what English-Chinese dictionaries are for - good ones (like our Oxford Chinese Dictionary) disambiguate words with a lot of senses in English, so it'll be clear even without cross-referencing or reading example sentences which word means "take" in the sense of "take your medicine" versus "take something away."

 

The ubiquity of full-text searches of Chinese-English dictionaries in dictionary apps is mostly a byproduct of the fact that as yet there's only a CC-CEDICT and not a CC-ECDICT. (though we'd love to find a way to build an affordably-licensed English-Chinese counterpart to PLC into our free app at some point)

 

With students, though, based on my own limited experience with this I'd probably just have them look the word up themselves instead - anybody in China studying English is probably going to have an English-Chinese dictionary on their phone anyway, and one of them will probably have the definition pulled up 10 seconds after you say the word and tell everyone else exactly what it means. (can speed up the process by writing it out on the blackboard) At which point you can take a few seconds to scribble down that translation yourself so you'll know the most idiomatic way for a young native speaker in Hangzhou to say that word in 2015, something that no dictionary (yet) is likely to be able to tell you :-)

[lechuan]

I usually click on each candidate Chinese word, look at the popup definition or click the magnifying glass icon to look it up, then make sure the definitions and sample sentences are in the right ballpark.

I mainly use E-C dictionaries an index of entries to check in the C-E dictionaries.

There's also the reverse search (ie, searches the text of the C-E definitions). Just put a # sign in front of the English search term.