character-ology

[stephenn]

Any chance to get "Chinese Characters: A Genealogy and Dictionary", as on Zhongwen.com? or something similar?
I find it a helpful way to learn characters, but the web interface is clunky enough, but especially without a full computer.

Steve

 

[mikelove]

Any chance to get "Chinese Characters: A Genealogy and Dictionary", as on Zhongwen.com? or something similar?
I find it a helpful way to learn characters, but the web interface is clunky enough, but especially without a full computer.

That particular title seems unavailable - wrote him several times and he wasn't interested - but we are looking around for something similar. (indeed we already have a little bit of this functionality through our character info screen's Chars tab)

 

[stephenn]

Any chance to get "Chinese Characters: A Genealogy and Dictionary", as on Zhongwen.com? or something similar?
I find it a helpful way to learn characters, but the web interface is clunky enough, but especially without a full computer.

That particular title seems unavailable - wrote him several times and he wasn't interested - but we are looking around for something similar. (indeed we already have a little bit of this functionality through our character info screen's Chars tab)

Cool! That actually has alot of what I was looking for.

 

[root]

Oh man, this is very disappointing -- I was hoping to see Rick Harbaugh's content as part of Pleco, it would easily be worth same price as the paper book or a bit more.

Not sure what other similar content exists, looking forward to any introduction here.

 

[mikelove]

Oh man, this is very disappointing -- I was hoping to see Rick Harbaugh's content as part of Pleco, it would easily be worth same price as the paper book or a bit more.

Have you taken a look at the Chars tab? Doesn't include all of the etymological data but it does give you the component breakdowns at least.

 

[bokane]

Would there be any chance of support for vector or bitmap-based images in future versions of Pleco? Zhongwen.com and Harbaugh's dictionary are so inaccurate in their etymologies that they're not really useful for much other than mnemonics, but I for one would love to be able to ditch my paper dictionaries of seal/oracle/bronzeware-script characters. Right now I use the (slightly irritatingly misnamed) Chinese Etymology app for iOS, but it requires an internet connection.

 

[mikelove]

Would there be any chance of support for vector or bitmap-based images in future versions of Pleco? Zhongwen.com and Harbaugh's dictionary are so inaccurate in their etymologies that they're not really useful for much other than mnemonics, but I for one would love to be able to ditch my paper dictionaries of seal/oracle/bronzeware-script characters. Right now I use the (slightly irritatingly misnamed) Chinese Etymology app for iOS, but it requires an internet connection.

Where, in user dictionaries or in our own? We're already adding embedded image support for our own dictionaries in a future release for the sake of Grand Ricci (which has a goodly quantity of those characters) - embedded images in user-generated content are certainly possible too but we'd like to get things a bit more settled with our file sync solution first since any embedded media has the potential to hugely increase the size of people's files.

 

[bokane]

Oops - sorry to be checking back in so late. I'd been thinking about both Pleco and user-generated dictionaries, actually -- though are there any authoring tools for user-generated dictionaries? Basically I'd just love to be able to replace my 汉字源流字典 and various similar dictionaries with digital equivalents.

 

[mikelove]

Oops - sorry to be checking back in so late. I'd been thinking about both Pleco and user-generated dictionaries, actually -- though are there any authoring tools for user-generated dictionaries? Basically I'd just love to be able to replace my 汉字源流字典 and various similar dictionaries with digital equivalents.

No, that's not something we particularly want to encourage since a lot of people would inevitably use it to pirate dictionaries a la StarDict. (we'd actually love to offer 汉字源流字典 in Pleco officially, but we haven't managed to license it yet, though we do plan to update Grand Ricci later in the year with a bunch of historical character images)

 

[root]

Have you taken a look at the Chars tab? Doesn't include all of the etymological data but it does give you the component breakdowns at least.

Yes, I've looked at it, and it does not replace Harbaugh's book -- I mostly use his book for the etymology tips, it's the mnemonic that is valuable.
Has anyone tried typing his book as a flashcard list that you know?