Dave’s Wagon

I feel compelled to share something that has made my time in China and my time spent studying Chinese markedly less frustrating. It’s called PlecoDict, and it’s a Chinese/English dictionary app for PDAs (Palm OS and Pocket PC). A friend of mine recommended it to me before I departed for China and though it was $60 for the basic version, I shelled out the money along with $100 for an entry level Palm device.

What really sold me on PlecoDict over the generic clamshell electronic translators was PlecoDict’s ability to recognize and lookup characters simply by drawing them. Initially I had doubts about how well this feature would function, but after nearly half a year of using it, I can say with assurance that so long as one gets the stroke order correct, the program almost never fails to return the right character. Often times one can mess up the order, write the character in semi-cursive, or even leave out a few strokes and still get a correct return.

The allure in this is obviously that one can now easily look up characters which he or she cannot pronounce (and hence cannot produce the pinyin for). True, any dictionary organized by radicals could essentially accomplish the same thing, but for me that could never match the ease and portability of simply scribbling down the hanzi and getting an instant answer. The people around me tended to agree as they were constantly borrowing my PDA or turning to me for translations while on the street in China.

Of further use has been PlecoDict’s flashcard feature. Any word in the program’s dictionary, as well as user-created entries (which PlecoDict allows), can be made into flashcard quizzes. These flashcards can be filed into lists by topic and the user can quiz his or herself on multiple lists at a time. Additionally, the user can set it so that cards are automatically removed as he or she answer them correctly or reinserted after being answered incorrectly. The cards can be set to quiz by character, English definition, pinyin, or any combination of the three. It’s an absolutely wonderful alternative to fumbling with paper flashcards or simply trying to retain characters on sight.

All this said, PlecoDict (or at least my basic version) does have some minor shortcomings. For one, the English entries are based on British English. Because of this, I have occasionally entered a common word only to be told to look up the British equivalent instead. Sometimes the program does not even go that far and returns no answer at all. It took me awhile to find the entry for “bathroom” or “restroom”; it was filed under “lavatory”. Damn British.

Furthermore, while PlecoDict allows the user to created new Chinese entries in the dictionary, it does not allow for the creation of English entries. This means that any new words the user creates can only be found while searching in Chinese, not in English.

These problems are minor, however, and hopefully they’ll be addressed in future versions of the program.

The only thing that holds me back from straight-out recommending this program to anyone studying Chinese is my lack of knowledge about what alternatives exist. Is there something better out there? If anyone knows, please let me know.

This entry was posted on Saturday, January 27th, 2007 @ 11:18 am on the category Technology, Language. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

I feel compelled to share something that has made my time in China and my time spent studying Chinese markedly less frustrating. It’s called PlecoDict, and it’s a Chinese/English dictionary app for PDAs (Palm OS and Pocket PC). A friend of mine recommended it to me before I departed for China and though it was $60 for the basic version, I shelled out the money along with $100 for an entry level Palm device.

What really sold me on PlecoDict over the generic clamshell electronic translators was PlecoDict’s ability to recognize and lookup characters simply by drawing them. Initially I had doubts about how well this feature would function, but after nearly half a year of using it, I can say with assurance that so long as one gets the stroke order correct, the program almost never fails to return the right character. Often times one can mess up the order, write the character in semi-cursive, or even leave out a few strokes and still get a correct return.

The allure in this is obviously that one can now easily look up characters which he or she cannot pronounce (and hence cannot produce the pinyin for). True, any dictionary organized by radicals could essentially accomplish the same thing, but for me that could never match the ease and portability of simply scribbling down the hanzi and getting an instant answer. The people around me tended to agree as they were constantly borrowing my PDA or turning to me for translations while on the street in China.

Of further use has been PlecoDict’s flashcard feature. Any word in the program’s dictionary, as well as user-created entries (which PlecoDict allows), can be made into flashcard quizzes. These flashcards can be filed into lists by topic and the user can quiz his or herself on multiple lists at a time. Additionally, the user can set it so that cards are automatically removed as he or she answer them correctly or reinserted after being answered incorrectly. The cards can be set to quiz by character, English definition, pinyin, or any combination of the three. It’s an absolutely wonderful alternative to fumbling with paper flashcards or simply trying to retain characters on sight.

All this said, PlecoDict (or at least my basic version) does have some minor shortcomings. For one, the English entries are based on British English. Because of this, I have occasionally entered a common word only to be told to look up the British equivalent instead. Sometimes the program does not even go that far and returns no answer at all. It took me awhile to find the entry for “bathroom” or “restroom”; it was filed under “lavatory”. Damn British.

Furthermore, while PlecoDict allows the user to created new Chinese entries in the dictionary, it does not allow for the creation of English entries. This means that any new words the user creates can only be found while searching in Chinese, not in English.

These problems are minor, however, and hopefully they’ll be addressed in future versions of the program.

The only thing that holds me back from straight-out recommending this program to anyone studying Chinese is my lack of knowledge about what alternatives exist. Is there something better out there? If anyone knows, please let me know.

This entry was posted on Saturday, January 27th, 2007 @ 11:18 am on the category Technology, Language. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.