Pleco Update: Chinese-Chinese License

[mikelove]

Greetings all,

A follow-up to my thread from last summer: we at Pleco Software have just signed a license for the 现代汉语规范词典, our very first Chinese-Chinese dictionary. There's a detailed website about it at http://gfcd.fltrp.com/. Thanks again to carlo for the suggestion. This dictionary should be premiering in our next big release (Pleco 2.0), which among other things will (we think) be our first product for desktop computers, so there's a lot to look forward to there.

I should also mention that we've recently posted a bug-fix update for PlecoDict; the new version, 1.0.3, is available for download for Palm and Pocket PC at http://www.pleco.com/download.html. We've also released a new English-to-Chinese business dictionary, the Cheng & Tsui English-Chinese Lexicon of Business Terms; there's a description of that at http://www.pleco.com/plecodict.html.

Happy St. Patrick's Day,

Michael Love

Pleco Software

[gato]

Great list of features for 2.0, if a bit ambitious.

You might think about doing a staggered rollout of features, i.e. 2.0, 2.1, and so on, to get the most important improvements out as early as possible.

I can already read Chinese books and primarily use plecodict to help increase my vocabulary and practice writing Chinese characters through the flashcard system. Although the current flashcard system already meets my needs, it took me a little while to figure out how to make it do what I wanted. Making the flashcards more user friendly would have made plecodict an even more obvious purchase from the get-go.

Sound is probably a nice, sexy add-on that novice learners like, especially when they comparison shop against other electronic dictionaries. Thus, it's probably a must for version 2.0 from a marketing perspective, but I'd say that sound for a Chinese dictionary is probably not that essential because of the regularity of the Chinese pronunciation system and pinyin. It is much more essential for an English dictionary.

One feature you didn't include is the possibility of adding a simple reader to plecodict. Currently it seems that on the Palm, only Tealdoc works with plecodict. It works well enough. But if you can integrate a very minimalist textfile reader into plecodict, that would make plecodict THE killer app for Chinese learners. It would help users avoid the frustration of testing various readers programs to see which one would actually work with plecodict.

[roddy]

The list of 2.0 features includes a document reader, no?

I think it's looking great. Like Gato sound is something I can live without, but a Chinese-Chinese dictionary and a built in doc reader are probably my two biggest wants.

Actually, thinking about it, sound would probably be a useful addition to the flashcard system. Sure, you can say the words out loud, but I reckon hearing it might help you fix it in memory. I'm also curious, are you doing a seperate sound file for every single ABC entry? Or just doing the most common entries, or putting them together on the fly from smaller units?

However, Mike, you forgot to give us a concrete, 100% certain, will not be missed release date

Roddy

[gato]

Oops, I misread. I thought the new "document reader" in the specs referred to the flashcard text importation issue I raised with Mike Love before.

Adding sound for a Chinese dictionary should be much easier than for any other language . The universe of possible pronunciations for characters is fairly small (between 500 and 1000?). Although it won't sound entirely natural to string these individual characters together to form words, it will be good enough.

[randall_flagg]

Same question here: When is this going to be available for purchase?

Question: What would a reader do for me that Word To Go or any of the other applications don’t do?

Roddy, I know I've thanked you before, but I just have to do it again: Plecodict was well worth buying the PDA. I used it so often, don't know what I would do without it. Thanks for recommending it, I’m trying to spread the word among my friends as well.

[sui.generis]

Release Date: we're not saying anything too specific; "sometime in 2006" is our current goal, we'd like to have some sort of Preview Release (with a subset of the finished product's features) available by summer if we can have things in a usable state by then. This is a big project, but at the end of it we should have a product that will do just about anything that you might reasonably expect a Chinese dictionary to do (and a lot of other things that no Chinese dictionary has ever done before).

Actually, Roddy, I ran this through a number of languages in babelfish (ya know, eng to greek, greek to french, etc etc back to english one last time), and it came out as:

We will release 2.0 at 3pm GMT on May 13th 2006. On May 14th we'll open up a can of whoop-asterisk on world hunger and senseless violence.

See, they tried to code it for plausible deniability, but you got to get up pretty early in the morning to slide one past me

[roddy]

Roddy, I know I've thanked you before, but I just have to do it again:

Stop it, I'll blush.

Actually, Roddy, I ran this through a number of languages in babelfish

Interesting. I ran it through Adsotrans and got this.

We will release 2.0 at 3.04pm GMT on May 13th 2006. On May 14th, just after breakfast, we'll open up a can of whoop-asterisk on world hunger and without meaning violence.

So you can see, Adsotrans wins out for accuracy, but doesn't yet have senseless in the database.

Enough nonsense.

With reference to the benefit of an inbuilt reader, I'm sure Mike will fill in (once he's stopped cursing me for asking for a release date), but I guess that fact that Plecodict will have complete control over that page means they can do stuff like 'click to look-up / enlarge', highlight words in certain vocabulary lists, maybe produce vocab lists for a certain text, perhaps have a split screen thing going on, with text at top and a look-up window below, and potentially even stuff like simp trad pinyin conversion. At the very least I would expect dictionary look-ups to be quicker.

Plus as gato mentions, it's a pain in the neck finding a doc reader that plays nice with Plecodict, although like gato I eventually settled on Tealdoc. It'll be nice to have something inbuilt.

[Shadowdh]

I for one cannot wait till it comes... Pleco is just so damn amazing its criminal. Not only is it such a massive help as a learning aid but it also helps with some pretty far out words like colitis and other "common" medical phrases. Mike you rock...

[mikelove]

Sorry for the slow reply - after a very busy weekend we now have a working and fully ARM-accelerated version of SQLite for Palm OS, so that's one technical hurdle down and a couple dozen to go.

gato - punting some of these new features to a later version is not a bad idea, but in general I prefer the approach we used with PlecoDict 1.0 where we released an incomplete development version as a "preview release" - that way, the people who really want the software get it ASAP, but we can still take our time to make sure the finished release feels as complete and polished as it can be and has every feature we want to include. And we get several months of great customer feedback while we're doing all that polishing. A full-fledged document reader is definitely in the works, and in addition to the marketing benefits there actually are a lot of neat things we can do with audio - working it into flashcards as roddy mentions, using it for some sort of listening tester (hear a random word and guess the Pinyin), and eventually maybe also for teaching people to hear different dialects / accents correctly. (how to tell the difference between a Southerner's "shi" and "si", for example)

roddy - we're not planning a separate sound file for every ABC entry, if we did that we'd have to ship the software on a DVD But we're certainly doing more than just assembling words out of single Pinyin syllables - we'll do that for words that don't have their own separate recording, but there should be 10,000+ multi-character recordings in there too (including every HSK word).

Shadowdh - thanks! If one of these new English-to-Chinese licenses goes through, though, we'll go far beyond common medical vocab - wouldn't it be nice to have a Chinese translation for pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis?

I'm still not going to say much beyond "sometime in 2006" for a release date, but I will say that the largest annual conference of foreign language teachers in the US is held in mid-November and we'd very much like to have a finished product ready to show off there. (2.0 should give us our first real crack at widespread classroom adoption, particularly if our new automated/centrally-managed licensing system makes it into the finished version) Development has gone quite well thus far, though, and summer remains a good target for a preview release, particularly given our desire to avoid having early UMPC adopters jump ship to one of our competitors. (the first UMPCs are supposed to be out in April, though they'll probably be Japan/Korea/HK-only for a few months)

roddy's exactly right about the document reader - the integration is key, particularly on Palm with its lack of support for multitasking. All of the features listed there are possibilties, but beyond that (and the faster lookups) a big part of the benefit is that in our software you don't have to rely on a separate Chinese OS - you can view documents in GB/Big5/UTF-8/UTF-16 without having to worry about reconfiguring CJKOS (or running them through a converter on the GB/Big5-unfriendly Windows CE). And without having to worry about the (unavoidable) software compatibility issues with Instant Access on Palm OS.

[roddy]

Just having the audio for the HSK lists is already fantastic, I think. By the time you know the HSK lists you shouldn't even need audio, and if you have those 8000-odd entries then I'd guess a lot of the words you don't have a recording for can be built up out of two or more syllable blocks, rather than single syllable ones.

All looks fantastic, I'd been wondering about Plecodict on a UMPC. Also glad to hear you'll be having another preview release.