21st Century English-Chinese Dictionary?

driftwork

秀才
I've been using PLECO 2.0 for the last week and its brilliant.

For a beginner, the new flashcard features are tremendously useful.

Currently, I have 'Professional Bundle' and have purchased the 'Tuttle' dictionary as an add-on.

I'm wondering, how useful and necessary is the 21st Century English-Chinese Comprehensive Dictionary for a beginner / intermediate student?
 

beirne

进士
The Chinese is all in characters, so the 21st Century Dictionary can be a bit rough for beginners, although you can do reverse lookups on words or characters and get the pinyin from one of the Chinese-English dictionaries. Its big advantage is the huge amount of entries. It even has an entry for Efrem Zimbalist, Jr., so you can bet it has a lot of entries that you actually care about.

If you're not sure if you're ready to buy it, then try looking up words that interest you in the dictionaries you have. If you keep finding that they aren't there then it's time to get the 21st Century Dictionary.
 

Alexis

状元
Sample entry can be found here:

http://www.pleco.com/21cn.html

Although I can't read many characters (working on it though), I send the entry to the Pleco Reader and then figure out the definition from there. It's also a great incentive to learn to read characters as there just aren't very many E-C pinyin dictionaries to choose from (And the better ones are already in plecoDict!)

- Alexis
 
I've been living in Taiwan and studying Chinese since 1994. In language studies a good dictionary is generally 10 or more kilograms. That's why Pleco is wonderful.

There really is no such thing as a perfect dictionary. Being able to have more than one to refer to is just about as good as it can get. My PDA also has several English dictionaries as I have the space for them. Having a computer/interface that sits in your shirt pocket rather than a backpack is also very important. Many times I am out and about and just want to translate a street sign or billboard. If I had to dig for a big book or a laptop, I'm certain I never would have learned as much on the fly as I have with a PDA. Even later when you are more adept, the beginner's dictionaries are excellent for review and self testing. The advanced dictionaries are useful to a beginner when they just want to translate something that is real life, like the downloading instructions to my Taiwanese phone answering machine [it even gives the message time in Chinese]. One never really learns a language by sticking with the basics.

In sum, it really doesn't hurt to buy everything you can afford when first starting out. You'll do more than save money. You will learn a bit faster.
 
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