I just want to quickly ask the Chinese learners on here which Chinese dictionary they think is the best to use when LingQing. I have not had success with the few dictionaries I have tried.
@ColinJohnstone - When I was studying Chinese on the site I used Youdao and MDBG Chinese. Youdao usually showed the Pinyin, but I often had to scroll down a bit in the dictionary pane. I found MDBG to be pretty good, but didn’t have as much information as Youdao typically offered.
Although it doesn’t help with LingQing, I rather use the Zhongwen Chinese Popup Dictionary extension for Google Chrome for anything I do in Chinese online. It’s a mouse-over dictionary that gives the simplified characters, traditional characters, and pinyin, followed by all the possible English translations.
It’s also very good at figuring out what constitutes a “word” or even idiom and will further break down the multi-character word or phrase it highlights into single characters and their definitions as well beneath the explanation of the full word or phrase.
Thanks boys. I will check out these resources.
@ alex - Have you guys ever considered having the reading interface automatically add PinYin to LingQs? I can imagine such a feature would be very useful. Maybe when one clicks the ‘Search Dictionary’ button, the hint field could have the pinyin automatically inserted instead of being blank. People could then quite easily remove it if they wanted to.
I would put another vote in for zhongwen for Chrome, especially for reading on its own. For dictionaries I think youdao and baidu (baike if you want more detail) are the best. For example sentences and usage, I also use iciba and bing, as well as others – there’s no shortage…although youdao and baidu provide good ones as well. Offline I use Wenlin but that’s more for character study. For listening and reading at the same time, I use the MDBG reader which is very useful for reading along with native speed material (can get a free trial but it’s not free forever)…uses same dictionary as zhongwen (CC-CDICT).
@ColinJohnstone - Instead of putting it in the Hint field (since the Pinyin doesn’t actually give any definition), we’ve thought about having the Pinyin display next to the term, for example. We haven’t yet had a chance to focus on this, but there are several Chinese-specific enhancements that we hope to be able to implement in the future.
Iphone Apps: 1. Pleco, 2. 有道词典 (youdao cidian)
Both of them highly recommended, enjoy!