Pleco vs Wenlin

[ZhuGeLiang]

I have been using wenlin for a couple of years and I think is an excellent program. I use the program mainly to read text. By "hoovering" the cursor over the text I get the translation very quickly.

I'm now thinking of buying a PDA and Pleco. My question is, does Pleco have a similar "hoovering" function? Is it possible to open the complete text within the program like in Wenlin?

 

[mikelove]

It's not quite that seamless yet, but we do have a feature where you can highlight a piece of text anywhere on your PDA and push a button to quickly bring up PlecoDict with a definition. (it's a little faster on the Pocket PC version than the Palm one, because it can stay loaded in the background while you use another program)

We're working on a Wenlin-esque document reader for a future version of PlecoDict, though.

 

[micas]

How about adding a frequency list while you're at? Characters by frequency? Or common nouns, verbs, adjectives lists?

 

[mikelove]

Yes, there would probably be something like that built into the document reader's text segmenter. Actually the Unihan database already includes information about character frequency - look for the "Frequency" tag which is included in many of its entries.

 

[Anonymous]

frequency list and Karlgren

Dear Mike Love:

I was really excited when I purchased Pleco Dict because I read that it used Wenlin definitions.
But it looks like the most useful part of Wenlin was left out of Pleco Dict!

1) Wenlin lists a frequency number for the top 3000 characters as well as frequency number for combination words. This is very useful.

2) Wenlin has the quotes from Karlgren which explains the history of the character. Very useful for remembering characters.

Am I mistaken or has this been left out of Pleco? Is there anyway to get this included into Pleco?

Best,
Alex Yuan

 

[mikelove]

Sorry for the confusion - we do use the same ABC Comprehensive Dictionary as Wenlin, but in most other respects we're a completely different product.

You can get single-character frequency numbers in PlecoDict using the Unihan add-on database; go to http://www.pleco.com/dictaddons.html to download and install it. Once it's installed, you can look up a character in the Unihan dictionary to get its frequency (ranked 1-5) and various other useful information about it. We don't currently offer frequency information for multiple-character words, but it's certainly something we could look into adding, as there are numerous databases of that information available for free online. I think you're actually the first person who's asked for this feature - if you don't mind my asking, how exactly do you use the frequency information in your studies? How do you think adding it would benefit Pleco users?

Wenlin's character history sections are actually something they developed on their own, I believe - they do excerpt Karlgren and several other works, but I'm pretty sure Wenlin compiled the entries themselves. I suppose we might be able to license that data from Wenlin, but I think a better choice for us would be something shorter, along the lines of the character info from Zhongwen Zipu (http://www.zhongwen.com/) - on a PDA screen the Wenlin entries might be longer than people would want to read, and if all you're looking for is something to help remember a character, you really don't need more than a very brief description of the character's components and how they fit together.

 

[sfrrr]

Zhongwen with PD--be still my heart. Wow would that be helpful. I'm curious whether Rick Harbaugh would license it out.

Sandra

 

[mikelove]

Well at the moment we've got a whole bunch of other licenses to work on, so I don't know that we'd actually contact him anytime soon (or that he'd want to support a product that at least nominally competes with zhongwen.com), but we are hoping to find a way to add component-based character search capabilities to a future version of PlecoDict at least - it wouldn't come in that nice tree view, but you'd get a lot of the same functionality.