As August creeps round and Shanghai settles into the sort of air-conditioned coastal complacence that drives Wuhan residents mad with envy, I’m pleased to be able to announce the debut of an old project we’ve been quietly refurbishing: our ChinesePod dictionary.
Those who have been with us since the transition to V3 might remember our old site glossary, and be curious about what exactly sets this new dictionary apart from its predecessor. The answer is “a lot“. We talk a bit about the changes in this new News and Features podcast. Whether you listen or not, we hope you’ll agree that the new dictionary offers a number of concrete improvements over both the older glossary, as well as many other reference texts both offline and online.
Here are some of the major changes/features:
- More Authoritative Search: the new dictionary has approximately 160,000 entries, and comes with a large number of neologisms and proper nouns which simply aren’t found in traditional dictionaries. Compilation work is ongoing and we don’t expect the dictionary to stop growing in either size or accuracy.
- Sample Sentences: search results now include practical examples of usage drawn from our corpus of dialogue and expansion sentences. This is intended to provide an immediate sense of how (and which) words are used in conversational Chinese. This is especially useful if you’re searching for Chinese content using an English keyword.
- Related Lessons: if you search for something and we’ve taught a lesson about it, we’ll tell you what those lessons are right on the search page. This is a good way to get into the archive, and be more proactive reviewing new words. Bookmark these lessons and revisit them later!
- Less Spam: we believe a dictionary should be a reference tool, and that when you’re studying it helps not to be bombarded with spam, advertising and Google Adsense. We put our sales pitches elsewhere: the ChinesePod dictionary is advert free. We’ve also cut down on our use of the “blink” tag by 90%.
- Community Focus: you (yes, you!) can help us improve over time. If you see a definition you don’t quite like, or find a missing word we need to include, you are heartily invited to help us edit the dictionary. Suggestions on changes/additions are logged for review by our academic team.
So go and check out the dictionary. And when you’re done come back and give us your thoughts, feelings and suggestions for improvements.
中文 Chinese
LostInAsia Says:
August 2nd, 2007 at 6:27 pm
Looks very impressive - and when you say proper nouns, that includes movie titles, doesn’t it?! I entered “goodbye” just to see how it works, and much to my surprise, “Goodbye Lenin” was one of the things that came up! Crouching Tiger/ Hidden Dragon, Star Wars, Infernal Affairs… but The Departed didn’t work… 成龙 is Jackie Chan? Is there a third character for his name? (Ditto with Zhang YiMou, which only gave me “YiMou”. Zhang ZiYi worked in full.)
No Jenny Zhu or Ken Carroll in the dictionary, yet. I’m sure someone will take care of that soon.
Has ChinesePod created the long-sought for list of movie and actor names in Chinese and English?! Will I finally be able to ASK FOR movies in my local movie rental store in Taiwan, instead of just looking up and down every non-organized (to my eyes) shelf?!
Oh, I guess I’d better voice a suggestion: will there be audio for the words alone, as well as for the example sentences?
I guess the program is somehow set up to access all sentences in the ChinesePod database that use the phrase/ vocab item. This becomes a little amusing if you search for Hello - the example sentence “你好.”, and “你好.” ONLY, is given eleven times.
It looks fantastic - thank you.
Lunetta Says:
August 2nd, 2007 at 6:32 pm
I only came to ChinesePod after the change to v3 and cannot compare the dictionary to the old glossary but it looks like a major improvement. I especially like the idea of sample sentences which is closely linked to the idea of the expansion sentences if I’m not wrong?
I just tried looking up 你好 as a test and I was wondering why there are so many samples of the same phrases? Some of them vary in the pronunciation but others are identical. Technical glitch or intentional?
maxiewawa Says:
August 2nd, 2007 at 6:54 pm
I think it’s just the fact that 你好 rarely follows anything else in conversation. It’s not going to be inside a sentence about anything else… if you know what I mean.
I think the dictionary is a fantastic idea. I’m just lucky that I stumbled across it from a link in a blog, which I came across through the community page, which I found from a thread started by John老师, and I only found it through a Japanese language entry…
This is so complicated sometimes
Anyway, I love the dictionary, not such a big fan of the lack of a directory at the site. I’ve been a big fan of CPod for a long time, but am a habitual 小气鬼… the dictionary makes me want to change that. It’s just so fiddly finding a dictionary entry for a word, going to the lesson that contains the word, and having to download the mp3 to hear the entire dialogue…
Hape Says:
August 2nd, 2007 at 7:33 pm
The best online dictionary? What ist the best? Let’s see:
雙 results in a lot of sentences with 双, but no character entry
双 results in an entry, but it says English: “two”. The correct translation is “pair”.
After clicking “Edit” I see two entries: one misses the trad. character.
Why are all sentence examples in simpl. characters? Please put a simp./trad. radio button on the query page.
But anyway - thanks for the effort to set this up!
Lantian Says:
August 3rd, 2007 at 12:56 am
DIAMOND - I think this is a thing of beauty. I just tried it and it’s usefulness and ability to leverage the Cpod content is far-reaching.
If I could add one thing, it would be a nice photo to brand the dictionary, a nice fade to the white background of this photo.
http://www.flickr.mud.yahoo.co.....205611063/
Brendan (Peeling Mandarin) Says:
August 3rd, 2007 at 3:59 am
Thanks to your dictionary, I can tell you that I think your 字典 is 令人惊奇地.
Really nice addition to the family. Well done.
AuntySue Says:
August 3rd, 2007 at 4:35 am
Wonderful, thanks. The best thing about it so far is the examples and their links back to lessons. But I’m a little bit frustrated so here’s some more flag waving for trad.
Traditional characters tend to have more strokes and complexity, so they have more need to be displayed at a good size. Here the trad occupies only a quarter of the screen size of the simplified. Not fair! I can’t even tell whether or not hen3 is the same character both ways.
When it comes to ambiguous word choices like li3, I don’t recognise any of the character choices, can’t see the li that I’m looking for, because the ones I’ve seen are not listed.
I tried searching for the me of shenme. Nothing relevant came up, it must have taken it as English, so I retried with me5. Then the simplified character came up in the shape of the familiar traditional character, and there were (therefore) no examples given. It must be a little teething problem.
Still very handy despite my flag waving protests. Thanks for the work that’s gone into this.
David Hallgren Says:
August 3rd, 2007 at 1:40 pm
How about connecting this with the grammar section? A separate search inside the grammar section would be nice as well, but adding a new box in the dictionary listing grammar entries when possible would be great. Simple translations for words that play an important grammatical role often doesn’t say much.
trevelyan Says:
August 3rd, 2007 at 2:41 pm
This feedback is great everyone, thanks. We’ll be working to get things tightened up over the next two weeks or so, so don’t be dismayed if perceived problems aren’t fixed overnight. Non-numeric pinyin search seems to be the most popular request….
@LostinAsia - Zhang Yimou is sometimes referred to using just his first name in the Chinese press, so that is actually a legitimate entry. Don’t know if that would make sense in Taiwan, but there’s nothing preventing the addition of his full name though.
AuntySue Says:
August 3rd, 2007 at 7:25 pm
OK, I’ll be the bunny: What does huzzah mean?
Henning Says:
August 3rd, 2007 at 8:45 pm
AuntieSue:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huzzah
Henning Says:
August 3rd, 2007 at 8:45 pm
By the way:
Is dict.chinesepod.com down at the moment?
Daxiong Says:
August 3rd, 2007 at 10:05 pm
This is pretty much exactly what I was looking for. And the fact that users can add and modify it, I think there’ll be a huge explosion in it’s usefulness.
Foleadu Says:
August 3rd, 2007 at 11:27 pm
Really cool addition - something I’ve wanted since I signed up for V3. It seems like you’re adding something new every day.
Additional wants (for the Dictionary):
-ability to find a character by radical, like the print dictionaries. This is still the most useful way to look up a character if you don’t know how to pronounce it.
-For a given character, a list of associated words - for example, 好 might include 爱好and 好看
-stroke order and break down of the character’s parts/radicals
Of course, there are lots of other things that could be added (synonyms, related words, character origin, etc), but one step at a time!
The ability for users to edit and add is great.
Lantian Says:
August 3rd, 2007 at 11:37 pm
HIT Me - How ’bout adding a “I’m Feeling Lucky, Hit Me”-with-a-word button.
Over time, it’s functions could really grow. For example, I would probably come to the dictionary every day if the Hit Me button had a preference to smack me with a random word from the lessons of the past week.
Heck, the dictionary could even become fun!
In fact, now I want a RSS feed with a random word plus context that comes from the last week of lessons, or whatever my time duration preference that goes to my mobile phone. Actually make it convert the RSS to an SMS message. Yah..
Give us more of that Dave’s Love™.
Bazza 白锐 Says:
August 4th, 2007 at 8:01 am
Maybe you could add a mouse draw input for characters similar to this: http://www.chinese-tools.com/tools/mouse.html ?
trevelyan Says:
August 6th, 2007 at 4:42 pm
Test support added for traditional and non-tonal pinyin search. English entries have priority over non-tonal pinyin, so a search for “women” will return “female” as opposed to “us”.
@Bazza - have looked at mouse-drawn input. It’s an ongoing project here….
Phil in Tianjin Says:
August 6th, 2007 at 6:21 pm
Just testing! The first word I entered was jiemei (in pinyin). The correct result with simplified, English, pinyin and traditional was returned but no sample sentences or related lessons. I then copied and pasted the simplified characters (姐妹)and the same result came but now with sample sentences and related lesson: Newbie - Family Ties?
trevelyan Says:
August 7th, 2007 at 10:42 am
Hey Phil,
Will work on fixing that. There are two parts of the dictionary: a database of word information and a reverse-index linking words to sentences (and the lessons in which they are found). Will need to regenerate the reverse-index to enable pinyin search there. Not a huge priority, but it’s on my TODO list.
Thanks,
–dave
Bryan Says:
August 8th, 2007 at 10:01 pm
Dave and others,
This is an awesome thing you’re putting together. Please keep up the fantastic work! What do you think about changing the font of the word within each example sentence so it stands out similar to how http://dict.cn highlights the term in red. With an english lookup having multiple possible matches in Chinese (for example “always” returns 常, 总是, 从来, 老是, 历来, it might be nice to let the user drill down into just one of the Chinese entries to narrow the field as the number of example sentences continue to grow.
Mike B Says:
August 10th, 2007 at 12:23 pm
One thing I think would be very useful, and not too hard to implement, is the ability to search from an entry to words that contain that entry. Here’s the motivation: I learn a new word like 义工， and the character 义 is vaguely familiar and I want to remind yourself about it. The dictionary entry for 义 is rather abstract, what would be useful is to be reminded of words like 社会主义，and 义务。 （Ok, I can scan through the list of example sentences, but I think this is worth having as separate functionality)
Brendan Says:
August 12th, 2007 at 5:10 am
Yeah, it’s nice and all, but what about doing something really useful for students, like digitizing the Kangxi dictionary? I think it’s obvious that fame and wealth would follow.
Hape Says:
August 12th, 2007 at 5:12 pm
@Brendan:
The Kangxi dictionary is already online:
http://www.kangxizidian.com
Brendan Says:
August 13th, 2007 at 5:38 pm
Yes, but it’s not in an easily searchable form — using that online version basically requires you to do the traditional radical lookup and paging by hand for the majority of the characters that they still haven’t digitized, so there isn’t any speed increase over just using the print version of the dictionary.
Orlando Kelm Says:
August 18th, 2007 at 2:34 am
Is there are way to get to the dictionary from the cpod pages? It’s probably super obvious, but I can’t find it in the footer links.
Eileen Says:
August 20th, 2007 at 9:57 am
Hi Orlando,
At the moment, there is no easy way to access the dictionary (dict.chinesepod.com) but we are working on integrating it to the new CPod Home page which we will hopefully be out soon.
Hape Says:
August 23rd, 2007 at 4:12 pm
Thanks for the prompt correction of the issues I mentioned in a previous post of mine.
What I still miss:
a ethymological and/or menemonic approch to chinese character learning. I have tried this for some characters (appox. 260, in German), see link: http://taeglich.chinesisch-tra.....php?alle=2
Thanks again for all the valuable sentence examples in the CP dictionary.
trevelyan Says:
August 23rd, 2007 at 8:33 pm
Just a note that we’ve just released our first major update to the dictionary. This addresses a lot of the feedback that we’ve had here and elsewhere. The old address (http://dict.chinesepod.com) will continue to work as a redirect to the new location, which is:
http://labs.chinesepod.com/dictionary
Hape, we’ll do our best to keep the dictionary as updated and error-free as we can. If people want a collaborative place to collect word etymologies and/or mnemonic clues, we can explore all of this stuff. Improving the usability of our collaborative editing tools is a big priority for us: we use these as well.
SiliconValleyAndy Says:
December 3rd, 2007 at 9:15 am
Is adsotrans defunct? (I haven’t been able to get access it in a long time.) It had a key feature that I need — the ability to input a line of HanZi, and get back numeric pinyin. Will the CPod dictionary add this capability?