best / favorite pleco dictionary poll

[mikelove]

Yeah, we're trying to get new data out of FLTRP on that - they seem to have made some errors in their XML conversion, so now we want to do our own from the original prepress files. If that fails we'll just hire somebody to go through and proofread them, but one way or another we're going to wrangle all of those FLTRP titles into clean, typo-free condition.

 

I'm surprised the Pinyin is that problematic, though - we re-generated that ourselves based on better Pinyin sources; could you give me some examples of the Pinyin issues you're seeing?

 

Is the Français-Chinois half working better for you?

 

(also, if you want to give up on the whole thing and just get a refund, email support and we'll be happy to do that)

[laurenth]

Hello Mike,

 

I may have exaggerated a bit with the words "riddled with" and "quite often". And yet, FLTRP Chinois-Français suffers from the comparison with other Pleco dictionaries, which IMO are all of excellent quality.

 

Here are a few examples I came across today while studying my daily dose of flashcards:

 

•  冲撞 chong1chuang2 (chong1zhuang4 in all other Pleco dictionaries)
•  卓越 zhuo1yue4 (for zhuo2yue4)
•  分泌 fen1bi4 (for fen1mi4)
•  周折 zhou1she2 (for zhou1zhe2)

 

And that's today's session only.

 

There are other things where I'm unable to tell if FLTRP has it wrong, if it's slightly off, or if what it suggests is also acceptable, e.g.:

 

•  折磨 is presented as a noun or a verb, while all other dictionaries consider that word as a verb only.
•  照应 has only one reading (zhao1ying5) while other dictionaries have two (also zhao1ying4) for different meanings
•  将军 has only one reading (jiang1jun5) while other dictionaries have two (also jiang1jun1) for different meanings
•  指令 is presented as a noun, while other dictionaries say it's a noun or a verb

 

Learners who rely on FLTRP Chinois-Français only for their studies would learn things that are wrong.

 

OTOH, I was wrong to say that there are no examples, there are some in fact.

 

And, no, I don't want a refund. The added value of Pleco (and your customer service) to my Chinese studies is so huge that I can wait until new versions of FLTRP are available and be cautious in the meantime.

[vellocet]

The latest update of Pleco opened up a baffling array of dictionaries, all of them extra paid add-ons.  It even calls them a "vast collection" in print!    I have no idea how to tell them apart.  I would love some day to be able to make use of a Chinese-Chinese dictionary.  It seems a distant dream, but hard work will get me there.

 

I have the registered version of Pleco, so am eligible to download the NWP dictionary, I guess?  That's the only one that comes with Pleco?  Any of the free ones worth anything?  I remember way back when I first got Pleco I downloaded them all and there were inconsistent definitions, and ALL of them neglected to mention the part of speech of the Chinese words.    Is it a noun, is it an adjective, what is it?!  That's a basic function of a dictionary, for cryin' out loud!

[Shelley]

I use the NWP dictionary and  the cc-cedict. I find them good enough for my purposes and do not feel qualified enough to be able to make a sensible choice from the others.

 

One day I might find myself in the position where I need more information and then may have to think about another dictionary.

 

If I get really stuck I check my paper dictionary Han Ying Ci Dian, which I bought in 1989 in London and carried all over London and back home on the train. It is not light

[archimon]

 

The latest update of Pleco opened up a baffling array of dictionaries, all of them extra paid add-ons.  It even calls them a "vast collection" in print!     I have no idea how to tell them apart.  I would love some day to be able to make use of a Chinese-Chinese dictionary.  It seems a distant dream, but hard work will get me there.

 

I have the registered version of Pleco, so am eligible to download the NWP dictionary, I guess?  That's the only one that comes with Pleco?  Any of the free ones worth anything?  I remember way back when I first got Pleco I downloaded them all and there were inconsistent definitions, and ALL of them neglected to mention the part of speech of the Chinese words.     Is it a noun, is it an adjective, what is it?!  That's a basic function of a dictionary, for cryin' out loud!

 

You should be able to get the MoE and Cross-Straits dictionaries for free, and perhaps a few other dictionaries that I'm forgetting as well, but anyway both of those are C-C dictionaries, and are pretty useful if you don't want to invest in the Guifan (or some other C-C dictionary, but I, along with 50% of the people who've voted in this thread, think that Guifan is the best C-C dictionary you can get) yet. Using a C-C dictionary is far easier at a relatively low level of Chinese than it would have been in print form, because pleco allows you to simply highlight whichever words you don't know in the definition and it provides a popup definition for them. I could never use a physical Chinese dictionary, but I regularly refer to C-C dictionaries using Pleco since I have a very handy, and, for now anyway, necessary crutch to fall back on when my limited knowledge of Chinese fails me. 

 

If you are serious about going all the way with Chinese, I would recommend the professional bundle, which costs $80, without a moment's hesitation. The extra features and dictionaries provided are extremely useful, and if you, like me, start out with the basic (I think that's what it's called) bundle, or even buy dictionaries individually, you will end up buying many of these dictionaries anyway, often at a much higher price than the Professional Bundle offers. $80 doesn't sound like a deal, but it really, really is. 

 

As a last note, the Guifan (C-C), Oxford (E-C and C-E), and ABC (E-C and C-E) dictionaries all provide parts of speech, as I'm sure many other dictionaries in Pleco do, but I imagine that the Guifan and the ABC dictionaries would be the most highly recommended in their respective categories (other members of this forum should feel free to challenge this assumption if they disagree). I'm not sure how much you crave examples, but if you love them as much as I do, the Tuttle and Oxford dictionaries both contain tons of examples, though I've only actually used the Oxford dictionary, which I've found to be excellent. I hope this post helps a bit!

 

Edit: The Oxford also contains parts of speech - not sure about the Tuttle.

[imron]

Yep, I use Guifan by default, falling back to ABC C-E for when the word isn't in Guifan. I barely ever use any other dictionaries.

[iand]

One reason parts of speech aren't as useful as they might seem: I not infrequently find a word being used as some part of speech other than the one(s) Guifan and ABC say it is. In these cases, it's always obvious how the meaning of the word as a noun relates to its definition as a verb, or whatever parts of speech are involved. If the text you're reading isn't too high above your current level, you can usually tell by context what the part of speech is, you don't need the dictionary to tell you.

On the other hand, since you can tell the part of speech by the usage, if the word has several definitions, you only have to look at the ones that are the appropriate part of speech. This is especially so when you're looking up a single-character word.

[mikelove]

@laurenth - thanks! Will do another Pinyin recheck against better sources - looks like 冲撞 and 周折 were already in a first round of corrections we were preparing based on one automated check, but we'll do a few more to be extra sure.

 

@vellocet - yeah, there are rather a lot of them; we've been trying for the last few months to come up with a better way to highlight their unique qualities, but it's hard, descriptions and even screenshots don't really give you that good a sense of a Chinese dictionary.

 

Basic bundle dictionaries have varied, we sometimes include an E-C dictionary in it and sometimes don't. NWP was part of it for a while but we removed that a couple of years ago, more recently we started including the ABC E-C but only on Android (margin situation for Basic is rather tight on iOS but considerably less so on Android, thanks to lower royalties and the large % of Android sales that come from our website where we don't have to give either the largest or the second-largest corporation in the world a 30% cut of the proceeds).

 

Free dictionary situation has improved a good bit since those days, between MoEDict/Liang'an and some other more obscure titles like Soothill, so still worth taking another look at.

 

@Shelley - if your paper dictionary is 《汉英词典》 from 外研社, that's actually the dictionary we licensed as the basis for PLC :-)

 

On the subject of parts of speech, the concept doesn't even really map to Chinese perfectly to be honest - the distinctions between them are much less well-defined. (perhaps in part because there's no need to worry about endings - if you want to verbify 'stove' in English you have to invent a bunch of awkward new combinations like 'stoved' and 'stoving') So they're handy as a quick suggestion as to the best way to deploy a particular word, and also as @iand says as a way to limit the number of definitions you need to look at, but they aren't as essential or as obvious as they are in most other languages, which is why they were not traditionally a part of Chinese dictionaries at all and have only started to show up fairly recently. They will be showing up in our free PLC dictionary pretty soon, though. (another title with glitchy XML, hence the endless wait...)

 

On the subject of bundling, we're planning to start doing 'dictionary bundles' soon, TBH the main reason we didn't launch them with the latest batch of new dictionaries is that we've been hearing an increasing amount of chatter the last few months that Apple might be about to overhaul some aspects of their sales experience (at long last!) for iOS 10, and if that overhaul includes official support for in-app purchase 'bundles' and - more importantly - discounted upgrades of them based on previous purchases, we'd like to take advantage of that.

[Shelley]

This is the dictionary I bought in 1989

 

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/7100001307/ref=olp_product_details?ie=UTF8&me=

 

This one is dated 1996 but mine is 1988

[mikelove]

Yep, same one, though an earlier edition than ours.

[querido]

CC-Canto, an important project.

[Shelley]

Ah yes, so it is, its the one I use the most and forgot to add it to my list. So I would say PLC is high on my list.

[vellocet]

In these cases, it's always obvious how the meaning of the word as a noun relates to its definition as a verb, or whatever parts of speech are involved.

 

:wall

 

No, no, no, no, no it is not!  It is not obvious!    It must be explained.  This is what a dictionary is for!

 

 

 

On the other hand, since you can tell the part of speech by the usage, if the word has several definitions, you only have to look at the ones that are the appropriate part of speech.

 

 

Maybe it is obvious to you, and everyone else who is high atop Mount Olympus, consulting your Chinese-Chinese dictionaries and only on rare occasion spot-checking the old C-E, but to the rest of us gutter learners, it is most assuredly not so.      We can't tell the part of speech by the usage.  This is an unwarranted, completely unfounded assumption with no basis in how the Chinese language is learned.  You are assuming that every learner has a skill level equal to your own and going from there.  I am here to inform you that this is not so. 

 

In fact, of all the Chinese learners in the world, right now, at this moment, how many are at the level where they can tell the part of speech by the usage?  5%?  Maybe 10%?  Then the rest of us 90% who are, you know, actually learning the language have to deal with dictionaries that assume that we are experts who can tell the part of speech by usage. 

 

This makes me tear my hair out in frustration.    I would very much like to be at a level where I can just guess and be assured I'm right.  Where dictionaries are nothing more than a sort of Cliff's Notes to myself on what I've already learned.   But I ain't there and I ain't gonna be there anytime soon, either.  Chinese is a mountain and I need every bit of help I can get from every possible source, and the dictionary is right there at #1. 

[Guest realmayo]

Chinese is a mountain and I need every bit of help I can get from every possible source, and the dictionary is right there at #1.

 

 

Use a dictionary as a reference. Use a textbook or a teacher for learning. So when you look up a word you should have a good knowledge of what it is doing in that sentence.

[vellocet]

 

So when you look up a word you should have a good knowledge of what it is doing in that sentence.

 

Yeah, that's about the response I supposed I was going to get. 

[Guest realmayo]

Well I'm sorry not to disappoint. I don't think it's an unreasonable response. A dictionary isn't enough. If you "need every bit of help I can get from every possible source" then buy something like this: http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Dstripbooks&field-keywords=hsk+5000+luxing&rh=n%3A283155%2Ck%3Ahsk+5000+luxing: the1-3 book has at least five examples for pretty much every word. In mp3 format too. Much better than a dictionary.

Edit: it calls itself a dictionary ... but it's unrealistic to expect that kind of full treatment for every word in a dictionary. However it makes sense for basic vocabulary. And once that is mastered, then grammar becomes easier and rigid definitions are no longer so important.

[eddyf]

I think that even at an elementary level, when you look up a word, between the translation and the example sentence(s), you should at least be able to figure out "oh, it's being used as a noun here." What is harder to figure out is whether it's also ok to use it as a different part of speech that you didn't directly observe in the example sentence. While it seems like the vast majority of verbs can be used as nouns (with a meaning similar to the infinitive in English), there are many nouns without a corresponding verb. So when you look up a word and see it being used as a noun, how can you know whether using it as a verb is allowed? Similarly, the distinction between adjectives and verbs can get murky a lot of the time, but there are plenty of verbs that can't be used as adjectives.

 

So the problem isn't really being able to identify what the usage is in one particular example but knowing when you're allowed to generalize to other usages and when you're not.

 

ABC has parts of speech but I don't really get much information from it. I trust the parts of speech in Guifan a bit more. Somehow the fact that it's a C-C dictionary makes it seem more authoritative.

[歐博思]

So I've taken the plunge and gotten the Pleco professional pack, and having used the full version I totally concur with the others: Guifan almost feels like my "Chinese parents", explaining things shortly and sweetly with the ever-so-useful usage notes. The usage of the pipes " | " symbol also contributes to an overall clean feeling while searching the dictionary. 

 

Secondly, I'm enjoying the ABC dictionary as well. I want to equate this one as a sort of straight-talking "older brother" who just tells it like it is with not many extraneous words.

 

Thirdly, I'm still feeling the love for "smart uncle" MoEDict with all his literary examples and overall smart aura; it's just that my "Chinese age" isn't yet old enough to be having too many conversations with him. Those great Chinese novels just aren't important to me yet, but his depth of knowledge I feel may help me avoid unnecessary meetings with "distant relatives"—chengyu dictionaries—when I decide to get into more extensive reading in the future.

 

Well, this thread has served its purpose for me, but I will still be checking in regularly on further dictionary discussions to update answers that members would like to see added to the poll up top.

[iand]

Vellocet, I completely agree that the more help a dictionary (or any resource) gives you, the more useful it is. I also agree that "Chinese is a mountain and I need every bit of help I can get from every possible source, and the dictionary is right there at #1." So I agree that it's better for a dictionary to include parts of speech. But I also think that most of the time, the part of speech indicator is a small increase in usefulness, and not just for me. It will be most useful when you have little choice but to try to understand something that ideally you'd only get to later in your learning career. Unless you're constantly tackling things that you just don't understand at all, though, I think that for everyday usage, it is one of those extra things that it is nice for a dictionary to have, along with etymology, synonyms and antonyms, related forms like plural, past tense, and gerund (in an English dictionary), and classifiers (in a Chinese one). I am still in the middle of the road to learning. I don't have any divine direct perception of the meaning of words. When I encounter a word I don't know, I have to try to figure it out just like anyone else.

 

I think one big support for the idea that even a dictionary without parts of speech will be good most of the time (and not just 5-10%) is that CC-CEDICT doesn't include them (in fact has a policy against them), but this free dictionary is used all over the place: by Pleco itself, in browser pop-up dictionary addons (Perapera, Zhongwen, Zhong Wen), on websites and in apps that present material written at various difficulty levels (The Chairman's Bao, Du Chinese, Decipher Chinese, Just Learn Chinese), by the IRC bot in SnooNet's #Chinese channel (which people use every day), and by several online dictionary front-ends (MDBG, YellowBridge, the English part of Taiwan's Ministry of Education Dictionary, et al.).

 

As a concrete illustration, there was recently an article in Du Chinese that was above my level, called "Using Straw Boats to Borrow Arrows." I can only use it by tapping on every other word to see the CC-CEDICT translation. So when I see the sentence:

 

 

周瑜一聽大喜，當即與諸葛亮立下了軍令狀。

From tapping on them in earlier sentences, I know that 周瑜 and 諸葛亮 are people, but I don't know 大喜, 當即, or 軍令狀. Tapping on them reveals:

• 大喜: exultation, overjoy
• 當即: at once, on the spot
• 立: to set up/establish
• 軍令狀: military order

Even though this doesn't have parts of speech, I think I'm not unusual in being able to figure out that the sentence means "Zhou Yu on hearing this was overjoyed, at once together with Zhu Ge Liang issued a military order."

 

Most of the time, I don't think it's good to read something at this level, where you have to look up every other word. For this reason, I'm still on graded readers, where I only have to look up a few words per page, and I can mostly follow the story even without looking them up. Like realmayo, I advocate the use of other materials than just a dictionary. But even when you do read difficult things, I think a lot of them will be like this situation, where even CC-CEDICT, the most available but least complex dictionary, will help.

[Auberon]

 

Kroll very usefully notes what era a character has a certain meaning (he doesn't always do this, but he does it quite a lot) and he uses very particular translations. Their particularity can sometimes go a bit too far however.

 

I like Kroll's particularity. Especially when it comes to things like plants and animals, the 漢語大辭典 will often just say something like 'a kind of bird with a long neck' or 'a kind of plant with long flat leaves', and give no further details, whereas Kroll will positively identify whatever it is, and frequently provide a latin name or a very specific English one. Particularity is a central part of any dictionary; I don't think it's reasonable to expect a Chinese-English dictionary to also be an English-English dictionary for uncommon words.

 

I do think Kroll's dictionary is a marvelous resource (although I haven't voted for it here as I only have a paper copy, and, much as I'd love to have it on Pleco too, £30 seems a bit steep for something I've already paid £40+ for).