Chinese dictionary how does it work

Building the handwriting input was a case of good fortune. Motorola had a really good Chinese handwriting engine, so I spoke to them about licensing it. Most copyright licenses involve some sort of royalty advance, or at least a commitment to buy X number of units minimum over the term of the contract.

Motorola initially offered us a license with a much larger commitment than we could afford, so we countered with double their per-unit price but no up-front commitment. Surprisingly, they agreed to that. Screenshots of an early version of Pleco for Palm. Back then, it seemed to me that Motorola and Oxford were very generous about licensing terms — more willing to accommodate a bootstrapped startup of very limited financial means than copyright licensors tend to be with mobile app developers now.

Both were working with companies that made the sorts of standalone electronic dictionaries Pleco was inspired by. They could license to us and make a little extra money without giving up any of the money they were getting from OEMs.

But in mid-October of Apple opened in-app purchases to free apps, and we quickly restructured everything around that so that when our app launched in mid-December, we were able to make the initial download free. So the first part of that cost us a lot of sales and the second half of that left a lot of our users frustrated spending hours trying to get their newly purchased software working.

It seems like if Pleco were in the hands of anyone else but you, it would have died. I try not to discuss numbers in too much detail, but I think the profits were in the six-figure range by So I was certainly making something competitive with a senior developer salary just on Palm and Windows Mobile.

Love with his host family as a high school exchange student in Beijing. Pleco was niche, yes, but we had something that was unique enough that people were basically going out and buying Palm devices just for Pleco.

So even though we had no hardware, people were buying hardware just for our app. One might also assume that the most obvious path to growth for Pleco would be to venture out into other languages.

Have you ever at any point considered launching a like-minded app for Japanese? Or Spanish? I once tried to to develop a phrasebook product for a few different languages, which flopped spectacularly for reasons that should be obvious.

So that was my one attempt to branch out into other languages. The reality is that I just found Chinese much more interesting.

If you are using a computer to look up characters then the website mdbg. They are both free and will cover all of your desktop computer-based needs.

However, ideally you need a dictionary that you can look up characters and words with on-the-fly. Hands-down the best mobile iPhone and Android dictionary is Pleco. In the first case, where you know the English, looking up characters is easy. You simply type in the English and Pleco will spit out Chinese words and characters that match.

One problem here is that Chinese often has many characters for each English word. The dictionary will tell you all of the characters that translate to the English concept but this will include classical usage, literary usage, spoken usage, informal slang usage etc. This makes it tricky to tell which characters to use. You could look up the frequency ie.

The best way to check which character to use is to…you guessed it…ask a native Chinese speaker! Every beginner language learner needs to learn how to use a word, what to pair a character with and different expressions. LINE has your back with tons of usage examples.

Each word or expression comes with examples of it in use, and some even have full dialogues so you can see the words in action. In each example, you can click on any Chinese or English word to see its meaning s. And, best of all, every bit of this is recorded by actual Chinese speakers! Like the previous dictionaries in our list, LINE has handwriting recognition, pronunciations and translations characters, English words, pinyin. On top of that, though, LINE will help you speak by providing you with tons of context.

Finally, at the bottom of each conversation, you can find related words. By clicking on them, more examples and sentences become available so you can keep that learning going. This dictionary is best for learners who like studying with authentic materials. Pair it with FluentU for an unbeatable duo!

FluentU takes real-world videos—like music videos, movie trailers, news and inspiring talks—and turns them into personalized language learning lessons. Very similar to Pleco, Hanping works with smartphones and has all the functions we need from a Chinese dictionary. Sign up to my newsletter for a 7-day crash course in how to learn, as well as weekly ideas for how to improve your learning!

I merely included it as a reference. However, if you know words, using Chinese-Chinese dictionaries will be completely useless. At the start of the book, a list of the most common characters is provided, then a list of the most common and finally a list of Definitions of words in the dictionary are provided using only characters from each of those lists.

You can see that the limited number of characters available to use for the definition makes them a little tortuous at times, but the point is that the student is using Chinese to understand Chinese. Since I am in Taiwan it is easy to get these resource and to start with materials for an elementary first grader and a work up.

Actually, this approach can be both fun and productive. It just might be that adult dictionaries are for people that have 12 years of education. I am a beginner, and I basically use two tools to look up Chinese words, both of them on my phone: To look up the Chinese translation for an English word, or to quickly check the tone of a Chinese word, I use Hanping Chinese Lite by Embermitre.

If I encounter a Chinese word that I am not familiar with, I use the Google translation app, which lets me draw the character. At the moment, I only know about radicals, so using a regular dictionary would be out of the question anyway. But considering how user-friendly the phone apps are, I do think that it will be quite some time before I would even consider using a more traditional dictionary, which currently seems extremely daunting. Your email address will not be published.

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed. Hacking Chinese A better way of learning Mandarin. The problem with Chinese-English dictionaries Image credit: www. And then the same word in Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English :. Surviving gear you will need in the labyrinth Before entering the labyrinth and starting using Chinese-Chinese dictionaries in my studying, I had acquired some knowledge and tools: A broad vocabulary of around words.

Without basic vocabulary, finding you way will be like entering a normal maze blindfolded. Knowledge of a high number of individual characters. I went through the most common Chinese characters before starting. This turned out to be incredibly useful since I usually only need to combine things I know rather than learn something completely from scratch. I have an electronic dictionary or smart phone app which allows me to just tap a screen to go to the next intersection in the labyrinth.