Mike's Chinese Adventures

Memorising a large number of Chinese characters is notoriously difficult and consumes and large amount of a Chinese learner’s time. Even after you’ve learnt a character, keeping it in memory is quite difficult. Experts generally agree that learning and understanding the functional components of characters is the best long-term, sustainable way to do this. There’s a crowdfunding campaign going on right now for a special add-on dictionary for Pleco that looks like it will be an excellent tool to achieve this.

The dictionary is called Outlier Dictionary of Chinese Characters, and it looks like it’s much more substantial and useful than a lot of the Chinese learning apps coming out these days (especially for those moving beyond the early beginner levels).

It includes the usual things like pronunciation, definitions, support for both simplified and traditional characters and stroke order. But some of the things it has that make it different include:

• character form explanations,
• original & derivative meanings,
• component-by-component stroke order breakdown,
• HSK/TOCFL stats,
• character history (oracle bones, etc.) with explanations, comparisons & trivia, and
• related characters by:
  • sound series,
  • semantic component (including corrupted components), and
  • dictionary radical

  

  You can view more details (including a demo video) and back the project on its Kickstarter page here.

A friend of mine recently showed me a new Chinese dictionary web site that’s actually really good: Microsoft’s Bing Chinese dictionary (cn.bing.com/dict/).

I’m not a fan of Microsoft generally but they seem to have created a very slick and useful tool here. The stand-out features are:

• sample sentences that use the word you’re searching for in context,
• parts of speech identification, i.e. whether the word is a noun, verb, etc.,
• support for (some) ‘slang’ words, and
• pinyin support for the sample sentences.

For example, a search for “八卦” yields the following:

(There were some more sample sentences but I’ve omitted them for brevity.)

I think the sample sentences are where it really shines. Quite often when using other dictionaries, I would end up getting the new word I found and searching for it on Jukuu.com to see if it’s used the way I expect (for example: to check it isn’t just literary). Bing includes sample sentences from many sources (including Jukuu). Some sample sentences have audio and/or video but these just read the sample sentence in English.

Another big gripe of mine that this dictionary addresses is the grammatical parts of speech that the word can be used as. For example, it’s easy to see whether a word can be used as both a noun and a verb or only one of these.

Note that this tool is a dictionary and not a translator. They do have a translator located at bing.com/translator but I don’t think I will use it much because it doesn’t show the pinyin like Google Translate does (Google’s text-to-speech is much better too). A proper review of all the major translators out there is probably a topic for another post 😉