Looking for Beijing demo of electronic dictionaries

[Brendan]

dajia hao

I'm based in Beijing and want to take my Chinese to the next level ie intermediate. It's time i moved into the digital age and am looking for a bilingual electronic dictionary or something similar, which allows pinyin and pen input. After searching through the archives, the choice is large, and quite confusing for a techno-challenged individual!

My big favour to ask is, can anyone Beijing-based who owns a good system, spare me a little time to give me a demo and test run? Of course i realise i could go to a shop, but my experience has not been good and I would much prefer getting hands on experience from fellow learners rather than salespeople.

I live in the university district, Haidian, and am relatively free these next few weeks. If anyone is also free and willing to help I would be most grateful. My tel: 13718427061

[gato]

Maybe you can get in touch with xiaojiang. He is in Beijing right now and might be able to get you hooked into the cult of PlecoDict.

http://www.chinese-forums.com/index.php?/topic/106-websites-for-shanghainese75&highlight=plecodict

[Brendan]

Thanx Gato for your suggestion, Xiaojiang certainly sings the praises of PlectoDict but unfortunately is not around at the moment. Any other kind soul out there?

From another thread, there is a planned get together for Beijing-based people some time soon. When that happens, would anybody who's likely to come, please bring any portable digital/electronic dictionary etc?, xie xie all.

[adrianlondon]

I'm thinking of buying a Palm TX (£140 delivered from an ebay shop) and installing Plecodict on it before I arrive - if you can wait until September!

[adrianlondon]

I now have my palm pilot (Palm TX) and have just licenced my Plecodict software.

This is an excellent gadget. I connected my Palm via wireless to a free hotspot here in central London. I downloaded my emails, detached the Plecodict key file from the email they sent, and ran the unlock program.

I bought the expensive $99 version as the ABC dictionary seems much better than the Oxford one.

[Madot]

I have a Palm Tungsten E2 onto which I've put the Pleco Dictionary. It is TERRIFIC. I'll be happy to show it to you but won't arrive in BJ until 6 September.

By the way, I hope that won't be too late for the mooted get-together people have been mentioning for a while now...

:-)

Mado