Which Pleco Package is for me?

[silverwolf0]

I am an American Born Chinese who has a small knowledge of Cantonese. I can use that knowledge to sort of understand Mandarin and translate. I have taken one year of Chinese at my local high school. I am still a beginner. Which plecodict package should I get? I am not sure as one is E-C only, the other C-E only, and then there is the whopping expensive one with all of them in it. Which one would be good for me? Is the whole package deal worth it for a beginner?

 

[mikelove]

They're actually both C-E and E-C - the Oxford English & Chinese is bidirectional, the ABC is Chinese-English and the NWP is English-Chinese. So you can translate in both directions with any bundle you purchase.

In your case the Basic version should be sufficient - it should take you at least two years or so to start seeing a significant number of words that aren't in the Oxford dictionary. The Professional version does give you more room to grow (it has 8 times as many Chinese-English entries as the Oxford does), but you can fill in a pretty good portion of that vocabulary gap with the free Adso and CEDICT databases available at http://www.pleco.com/dictaddons.html (which will work with any of the PlecoDict bundles).