Cantonese on Palm

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Aunty

举人
I'll start learning Cantonese soon, and I'm looking for any way that I can use my Palm PDA to assist -- a dictionary, and anything else that's around. With Mandarin, I've grown used to doing everything related to study on the PDA.

Of course a Cantonese dictionary with PlecoDict would be ideal, but that's not likely to happen. Are there any Cantonese dictionary programs out there that work on Palm?

If you snoop around the files that come with CJKOS, you find one for "Cantonese Romanisation" which is unlike any of the more popular romanisations. If you don't know what you're doing with the language anyway, a bit of hunt peck trial and error will usually find the right word, but it's tedious. It's probably easier to enter the characters in Mandarin if you know that already :) and then use the cantonese one for the odd characters that you can't get via Mandarin.

Is there anythng else around? I hope learning Cantonese won't be a forced paper-based activity.
 
E

estudiando

探花
I check the cantonese pronunciation with the freebie UNIHAN dictionary in pleco. Also http://www.mdbg.net has the cantonese voice pronunciation. But with these, the entry is Mandarin Pinyin... so you must know the mandaring first...
 
A

Aunty

举人
Thank you so much for the text to speech program! I thought I'd have to buy and carry a second device to get that for Cantonese, but this way I can do it on the same PDA and integrate it with PlecoDict to some extent, using the unihan dictionary.

There seems to be three ways of inputting Cantonese so far:
Know the Mandarin for it already, and enter that.
Use guesswork with the obscure "Cantonese" romanisation input method that comes with CJKOS.
Draw the character with PlecoDict and check it with the dictionaries.
After that, hearing the sound will be a final check.

It's also made me bite the bullet and get a DA launcher, which opens up a lot more ways to use my PDA. It's great having the Cantonese text to speech and PlecoDict both available at all times and accessed in a similar manner.

No more making a mess trying to indicate the tones around the characters, I can quickly check it by sound any time! It's like using one of those pinyin mouseover web pages, but it's a voiceover.

If this is the sort of thing we can expect to see in the next version of PlecoDict for Mandarin, it will change the world.
 
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ehlfg

Member
Aunty said:
If you snoop around the files that come with CJKOS, you find one for "Cantonese Romanisation" which is unlike any of the more popular romanisations. If you don't know what you're doing with the language anyway, a bit of hunt peck trial and error will usually find the right word, but it's tedious. It's probably easier to enter the characters in Mandarin if you know that already :) and then use the cantonese one for the odd characters that you can't get via Mandarin.
Click to expand...

FWIW -- it wasn't clear to me what CJKOS was using for Cantonese romanization, so I emailed the developer. He responded by sending me the complete mapping between phonetic words and characters for the Cantonese input method.

It doesn't look like a single romanization scheme, as there can be multiple romanized entries for a particular character. For example, the character 再 can be entered using either joi, tsoi, or zoi.
 
C

choisum

秀才
The version on PalmGear has been updated.

0.13 was packaged incorrectly, the 0.14 version has:

* auto highlight in memo field
* auto copy from clipboard in DocsToGo and Plucker
 
C

choisum

秀才
ehlfg said:
It doesn't look like a single romanization scheme, as there can be multiple romanized entries for a particular character. For example, the character 再 can be entered using either joi, tsoi, or zoi.
Click to expand...

Any chance you can pm it to me? Based on the Whale example, I can cook up a Jyutping or Yale version real quick. Someone could then pass this back to the developers.

tks..
 
E

ehlfg

Member
choisum said:
Any chance you can pm it to me? Based on the Whale example, I can cook up a Jyutping or Yale version real quick. Someone could then pass this back to the developers.

tks..
Click to expand...

That sounds like it would be fine, but let me email the developer first just to confirm.
 
A

Aunty

举人
ehlfg said:
FWIW -- it wasn't clear to me what CJKOS was using for Cantonese romanization, so I emailed the developer. He responded by sending me the complete mapping between phonetic words and characters for the Cantonese input method.
Click to expand...
Yep, same experience here.

There is a wikipedia article on the Cantonese romanisation, which is interesting to read.
 
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