I am an expat living and working in China. Yesterday I purchased the basic bundle but I am somewhat disappointed with the quality of the NWP English-Chinese dictionary. Some 22,000 English entries is not too impressive I think. Furthermore, I noticed that swear-words seem to have been removed. It is not that I am swearing all day, but colloquial terms and strong language are part of the way real people speak. As a learner I want to expose myself to the whole languages with all its facets. This rediculous act of censorship might be due to the app-store's policies but I really have already more than enough censorship here in China. I then downloaded the CC-CEDICT which is free and much more comprehensive. I know it from the MDBG reader software which I use on my PC. That dictionary works much better.
somewhat disappointed
- Thread starter rohr4842
- Start date
rohr4842 said:
The NWP is included in that bundle because we wanted to have at least one E-C dictionary in there, but the main focus of that bundle (and the reason for most of the cost) is all of the other add-ons.
As far as your complaints about it in general, 22k entries is about as big as any E-C dictionary with Pinyin gets; we offer a 280k entry E-C dictionary too, but since there's no Pinyin it's mainly suitable for more advanced students, so it's not in the Basic bundle
As far as censorship, there are some issues with that in iTunes but also it's very hard to find uncensored Chinese dictionaries in general because most of them are developed in China - for curse words and slang you really need something user-created like CC.
Anyway, if you're unhappy with the bundle as a whole and would like to discuss an exchange or refund, just email or PM me and I'll be happy to help.
Given the importance of China I find it surprising that comprehensive E-C (software) dictionaries seem so hard to come by, anyway thanks for your comments and thanks also for the offer but there is no need for a refund. I have just started to explore the software's capabilities and I'm sure it'll be helpful on many fronts.