Looking for iOS dictionary showing HSK level for words

[魏一帆]

大家好,

 

Sometimes, when I translate a word from English/Russian to Mandarin I get many variants and it is hard to tell which one is more common and useful. I think it makes more sense to prefer the words included in lower levels HSK wordlists, i.e. I would prefer a word from HSK3 to a word from HSK6 or to one which is not in HSK words at all.

 

For example, on YellowBridge, we can see that "Proficiency Test Level" for the word "新“ is as follows: "HSK=2; TOP=Basic".

 

This leads to the question: are there any offline dictionaries/apps for iPhone that can do that? I have Pleco with free dictionaries installed and I have "trainchinese" dictionary/app, they are both very good, but so far I can't find the thing I need.

 

True, I can easily find the wordlists for HSK levels and create my own mapping between words/characters and their HSK level and then somehow convert it to my own dictionary, but I would rather prefer to re-use someone's work on that.

 

Thank you in advance.

 

祝好，

 

一帆。

 

[mikelove]

This is actually supported in Pleco; just click on the (I) next to a Flashcard/bookmark list name in Organize and click "Add Tag" to add a tag (abbreviation + color); you'll see that tag at the top right corner of the definition screen for words in that list.

[艾墨本]

Mike, is there a way to show this info more prominently that also doesnt require manual tagging?

For example, could you add a free 'dictionary' that is simply hsk listings or add an option to include HSK level in the headword? Maybe on the same line but opposite side of where pinyin pronunciation shows up?

[魏一帆]

Hi,

 

Thank you for your advice, Mike!

I'm new to this forum and it's truly impressive that I can get a first-hand reply from the main Pleco developer

 

It's good to know that there is at least some way of doing it, i.e. manually creating my word list based on standard HSK list (say, from hskhsk.com), tagging it with HSK levels and importing to Pleco using its annotations feature. But still, are there any ways to save this effort?

 

Thank you!

[Leirosa]

Pleco gives you the option to automatically create a full set of HSK flashcards (categorized by level), so you can actually save the effort of making a list manually.

On the sidebar in the flashcards section, tap import/export and then 'install premade cards'.

 

Once you have those, all you need to do is tag the categories (not the individual cards). I really got into this feature and also tagged my textbook categories etc.

[mikelove]

@艾墨本 - as @Leirosa says, you only need to tag categories, not individual cards. So you'd just import the premade HSK list (Import/Export / Install Premade Cards) and then assign whichever colors / tags you like to each HSK level; takes < 5 minutes.

[魏一帆]

That worked like a charm! Thank you, I didn't initially realise that "Install premade cards" means "premade by Pleco developers". I thought that "premade" means "premade by myself"

 

Also, this feature doesn't require having flashcards installed.

 

To summarise, I made the following steps:

 

1. "Bookmarks" -> "Import/Export" -> "Install Premade Bookmarks"

2. It asks about whether it's fine to install the premade HSK wordlist. Of course, it is!

3. Then I added tags for all six levels by clicking on "Add Tag" in "Bookmarks" -> "Organize Bookmarks" as Mike suggested before.

 

Now, whenever I search for a word which is in HSK lists, it displays a small colourful tag with the level in the top-right corner, very convenient.

 

Thank you very much, that solved my problem! 

[艾墨本]

Woah, didn't know about the tagging system previously. This is great!

 

Tagging all my cards now.