Outlier Dictionary of Chinese Characters

Hi I was wondering if there was gonna be a Black Friday discount this year? This dictionary would be useful for me but it's just out of my undergraduate budget.
 
We've just completed v1.9 of the dictionary, and it should be available in Pleco now.

It's been a while, so this is a big update! We're adding over 500 new characters (Essentials entries), plus ~70 new Expert entries, bringing the total to about 3800 characters with 400 Expert entries!

If you have the dictionary, you should get the update automatically, or you can go to Pleco's Menu > Add-ons > Updated.

If you don't have the dictionary yet, you can get it here or, of course, via in-app purchase in Pleco.

Here's the list of new Expert entries for those interested (see below for an interesting sample entry):

Simplified: 且丙业两书什入全内册刂则利勿听囧圣声头她妳嬭尹并弟征很德忄性情惪手扌政文明最杀殸煞牙物犭狠狼皮直祭竹笔第等纳聿艮良衤被豆閒问闲间页髟鼎磬

Traditional: 且丙並什入內全兩冊刂利則勿問囧圣她妳嬭尹并弟征很德忄性情惪手扌政文明書最業殸殺煞牙物犭狠狼皮直磬祭竹第筆等納聖聲聽聿艮良衤被豆閑閒間頁頭髟髮鼎
 
Another big update to the dictionary!

v1.10 added another ~270 Essentials entries, bringing the total to over 4000 characters. This was our final goal for number of entries covered. We'll still continue to add new characters, but they'll mostly be semantic and phonetic components that don't have entries yet, unless any glaring omissions are found.

But we're pretty happy to say our dictionary now covers all the characters you need to know in order to become fully literate in Chinese, including all of the characters for the HSK and (I think, but still need to confirm) TOCFL tests.
 
Quick bump to mention our Black Friday sale. Everything in the store is 40% off, including the dictionary as well as all of our (ever-growing catalog of) courses. Discount should be applied automatically at checkout, but if not, use 'BFCM2023' at checkout.
 

jiyan

Member
That's all good and well, thanks for letting people in this forum know. However, I think you are overdoing it in your email campaign. Sending an email every single day for several days in the row is a bit too much. Might be counterproductive as well as many people might resort marking them as spam.
 
I hear you, and I'm sure it's annoying for some, but looking over the data from previous Black Friday sales shows that:
  1. very few people unsubscribe or report for spam, despite the frequent emails during the sale,
  2. there's a pretty direct correlation between the number of emails we send out and the amount of revenue we bring in during the sale, and
  3. many people don't open the first few emails—likely because their inboxes are getting bombarded with all of the Black Friday promotions from other companies, and ours gets buried— but do open later ones, and then purchase.
Fortunately, our customers are mostly pretty understanding about it.

If we were more adept at the marketing side of things, maybe we could come up with a more sophisticated approach to audience segmentation so we could send fewer emails and get similar results. But we don't have the expertise to do that ourselves, or the budget to hire someone to do it. So, sorry for the annoying frequency during Black Friday, but maybe this helps understand why we do it that way (at least for now).
 

JD

状元
I know that I got way more black Friday email from Home Depot, Best Buy, and my local grocery store then I got from Outlier. Maybe that’s just common in the US, but during Black Friday, there’s a ton of emails that are coming in. I wasn’t annoyed by the outlier email at all, and I actually got twice the number because I accidentally have two email addresses registered with them.
 

Bai

Member
Hello,
Please can someone show the difference between the Essentials and the Expert version (like a screenshot or something)? Or at least explain what the difference in the entires are between them? Is it just that you get more works or that you get more info for EACH word? I'm going back and forth not sure which version to purchase. Thanks tons!! BTW, I can't get the demo of Outlier to work on either of my devices.
 

Bai

Member
Oh, one more thing please. If I purchase the Outlier, am I able to put it on all of my devices? Thanks again. Im so excited at finding it as I think it will help me in my character acquisition. I'm only at around 400 so far but there are some that I continually forget. UGH.
 

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
Demos: yeah, their online demo seems to be down at the moment; very odd. Maybe try a different browser?

You can indeed put it on all of your devices, yes. For cross-platform transfers you would simply copy down the "Registration ID" from the top of the Pleco "Registration" screen on the device you purchase it on, then enter that ID in the same screen on another device to activate on that.

For Expert versus Essentials, you can upgrade from Essentials to Expert later for the difference in price, so if you're on the fence I'd suggest you simply buy Essentials for now. The difference with Expert is that it adds extended 'expert' entries - about 400 at the moment - but it doesn't add any additional characters, just more data for some characters. Here's an example of an expert entry, for 需.

IMG_7926.PNG
IMG_7927.PNG
 

Bai

Member
Thank you! Excellent to know I can upgrade without losing money. I tried the demo on two devices but they did both have safari, but I just now try with Chrome and it did not work at all either.
 
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