"A Chinese-English Dictionary" Bug Report / Feedback Thread

[mikelove]

Since the newly-announced ACED is the first dictionary we've licensed over which we have total editorial control (can add / remove / edit entries however we like), we're even more interested than usual in getting people's feedback about it - what do you like, what don't you like, ideas for future improvements, etc.

One thing that's already come up a few times is the fact that single-character headwords aren't consolidated like they are in ABC; very different meanings of a particular character with the same Pinyin can sometimes have multiple superscripted entries, instead of all being combined into one. This is less useful than the ABC model for flashcards, so for that reason we're probably going to change it in a future update (couldn't do it for this one since it pretty much all has to be changed by hand), but if anyone wants to step up in defense of separate / superscripted entries we'd be very interested to hear from you.

 

[stisev]

Re: A Chinese-English Dictionary Bug Report / Feedback Thread

Mike,
I'm sorry, but I don't really understand this thread.

Since this is the first dictionary we've licensed over which we have total editorial control (can add / remove / edit entries however we like), we're even more interested than usual in getting people's feedback about it - what do you like, what don't you like, ideas for future improvements, etc.

Has there been a licensing of a new dict that hasn't been announced already?

 

[ipsi]

Re: A Chinese-English Dictionary Bug Report / Feedback Thread

Check the front-page: They've just released (same time as 2.0.2) a new Chinese -> English Dictionary. It really is called 'A Chinese-English Dictionary' and appears as ACE in Pleco. Go and have a look. It's really quite nice.

 

[stisev]

Re: A Chinese-English Dictionary Bug Report / Feedback Thread

HAHAH!! Oh my god. That's hilarious and unbelievably confusing!

Thanks for the info.

 

[ipsi]

Re: A Chinese-English Dictionary Bug Report / Feedback Thread

Sweet as

 

[stisev]

Re: A Chinese-English Dictionary Bug Report / Feedback Thread

You know, I know this isn't the place for it, but that's really, really honest and nice of mike to offer refund/new dict for those who recently paid for the older (more expensive) bundle. Pleco is not only awesome software, but an awesome company.

Edit: lol Mike - did you just edit the bundles page? Linguist package just popped back up! lol!

http://www.pleco.com/store/home.php?cat=1

That wasn't there before.

Now I'm confused again. The Linguist bundle is $149.95 but when everything is added, it is $229.95. The new complete bundle is the "ultimate" package but is $30 cheaper?

 

[mikelove]

Name is confusing, yes, but that happens to be what it's called - when you refer to "A Chinese-English Dictionary" among people who deal with a lot of Chinese dictionaries this is the one they think of. Though I suppose we could give the Pleco version of it a separate name if we could think of one - has to be better than "PlecoDictDB" though, and picking names for things has traditionally been viewed as one of Pleco's and my weak spots

And thanks! Crediting people seemed like the least we could do, particularly given that the only reason Linguist didn't include NWP from the get-go was due to a licensing blunder on our part. (corrected by a recent amendment)

Linguist plus all addons does indeed cost more, but we imagine some people might want just one addon but not all four, and they'd save money that way - if anyone actually buys 3+ addons we can easily credit them for the overpayment / missing dictionaries. I guarantee you there's somebody out there who wants Linguist + Tuttle and nothing else... FWIW, though, I've just added a note to the Linguist description about the add-ons, since it's probably best to make that more explicit to avoid confusing people.

 

[Shadowdh]

This is a nice little dictionary, its not as big as the ABC or Oxford but its got a great... no make that fantastic sentence examples and this I feel makes it easier to understand words and phrases... very nice addition Mike...!!

 

[ipsi]

It actually has rather a lot more entries - roughly 3 times as many as Oxford, according to the product information page on Pleco's main site. Still a lot less than the ABC, but still pretty good.

 

[Alexis]

Hi Mike,

I notice that the headwords are not consistenly replaced with ~ in example words/chengyu (sentences seem okay).

For example,

汉人 in the definition for 汉
名不副实 in the definition for 实

This kind of limits the usage of this dictionary (and the Tuttle) in character writing flashcard tests.

Regards,
Alexis

 

[Alexis]

I find the subscripted entries easier to scan compare to their equivalent ABC entries. What challenge does this pose to the flashcards?

 

[ipsi]

Take 上, for example. There are 3 different entries for that with a pronunciation of shang4. If you use it as a flashcard, then even if you see both the headword and the pron you'll have no way of knowing exactly which definition it belongs to, unless you memorize the superscript as well. Worse if you're relying on the audio instead of the pron - then you don't even get the superscript. There's a reason I have an automated program to merge my fairly long list of flashcards together before I import them into Pleco...

 

[Shadowdh]

It actually has rather a lot more entries - roughly 3 times as many as Oxford, according to the product information page on Pleco's main site. Still a lot less than the ABC, but still pretty good.

Ah I see... I think because I got a couple of characters/words that fell back to ABC/Oxford I assumed that ACED was not as extensive as Oxford in this case... actually a couple of times when this happened I thought it was because Pleco was reverting back to my old dictionary hierarchy (with ABC and Oxford in the number 1 and 2 spots) but then sheepishly realised that its simply the old "search other dictionaries when the word does not appear in this dictionary" thing...

 

[Alexis]

Take 上, for example. There are 3 different entries for that with a pronunciation of shang4. If you use it as a flashcard, then even if you see both the headword and the pron you'll have no way of knowing exactly which definition it belongs to, unless you memorize the superscript as well.

ipsi, thanks for clearing that up. I was mixing up the superscripts on characters with the numbered entries within the definition.

I was mainly referring to the fact that the numbered entries in the ACE dictionary have new-lines before them. For example, in the character 金, the newlines before the numbered entries make it easier to scan than the ABC's definition, but at the expense of screen real estate.

 

[hairyleprechaun]

I love the new dictionary Mike. The plethora of new example sentences make it well worth the purchase.

Thanks again for continuing to pursue additional dictionary licenses!

Darrol

 

[mfcb]

missing the hanzi in the last qi1

 

[mikelove]

hairyleprechaun - thanks! We've got another one coming soon that's arguably even more exciting than this one, actually.

mfcb - that's actually a very obscure character that isn't supported by our font files yet; we went back and forth about whether or not to remove those but for the time being at least we're leaving them in (may be upgrading our font files at some point).

 

[ssaito]

mike
i ordered the ace dict and downloaded to my palm zire 71's sd card (yup, i'm hanging onto this old palm until pleco is available for my iphone)

after ordering i re-downloaded from my account page and moved keyfile on sd card (given limited zire memory, i only copy the pleco executable to ram). however, when i started pleco 2.0.2 it didnt recognize the the new keyfile. i thought perhaps i should use the keyfile that came in my order confirmation email, but same result (didnt recognize).

finally i tried reseting pleco to demo mode (erasing all licenses) and then restarting to redigest the keyfile. that did the trick.

you may want to make a note in your instructions for unlocking, noting that people with existing licenses may need to set to demo mode and reingest the keyfile.

thanks
steve

 

[mikelove]

OK, thanks! We've gotten a couple of other reports of this occasionally happening, but we've never been able to reproduce it - seems to be entirely random as far as we can tell. Hopefully we'll eventually manage to figure it out.

 

[ben_gb]

I also like the new dictionary, especially with it's neat numbered lists of meanings when using Flashcards.

A question about those lists.... are they generally in the order of 'most common usage'?

One enhancement that would be really nice is if you could include the grammatical term for each word, like you get in ABC and Oxford.
However, I expect it would be too much work to add this if it's not already in the data that you've licensed...?

Ben