Walter Hutchens’ Blog

R. Shane McNamara, a law student at Washington Univ. in St. Louis and fellow Chinese law aficionado, recently brought software to my attention that allows my mobile phone to display Chinese characters.

The phone is a Treo 650. It runs an English version of the Palm operating system. Shane showed me PlecoDict, a good though rather expensive product for looking up the Chinese equivalent of English terms and looking up Chinese characters directly.

The full version of PlecoDict comes with three dictionaries, described in PlecoDict’s promotional literature as:

The Oxford Concise English & Chinese Dictionary, published by Oxford University Press, is one of the most popular Chinese-English translation dictionaries in the world. It was originally published in 1986; PlecoDict’s data files are based on the new 3rd Edition, published in 2003 and incorporating recent vocabulary words like ‘Internet’ and ‘SARS’. It includes both a Chinese-to-English and an English-to-Chinese component, containing 25,000 and 13,000 entries respectively.

The ABC Chinese-English Comprehensive Dictionary, also published in 2003, edited by the legendary John DeFrancis with the collaboration of Wenlin Institute and others, is the most comprehensive single-volume Chinese-to-English dictionary available, containing over 196,000 entries with comprehensive coverage of all contemporary Chinese vocabulary. It’s also used in Wenlin Institute’s Wenlin 3.2 software, which makes an excellent desktop counterpart to PlecoDict.

The New World Press English-Chinese Pinyin Dictionary (NWP), published in 2001, is one of the few English-to-Chinese dictionaries in Mainland China developed specifically for foreign learners of Chinese; it contains approximately 23,000 entries.

For years I’ve had the paper edition of the Oxford dictionary that comes with PlecoDict. I’ve often found it helpful, but I decided to buy PlecoDict mainly because it includes the DeFrancis dictionary which I know and am enthusiastic about from my use of Wenlin.

Wenlin is fantastic software. I’ve been an unpaid evangelist for Wenlin for years. In bookstores I’ve even approached strangers whom I saw looking at Chinese language materials and told them, “you must get this software called Wenlin.”

Wenlin ties the DeFrancis dictionary to the computer’s cursor/pointer, so that you can point at a word as you read and get an instant short definition at the bottom of the screen. Without Wenlin, you’d have to look up unfamiliar characters by radical classification and stroke order. That’s a tedious, inefficient process for non-native speakers. By relieving you of that chore, Wenlin provides training wheels for learning to read. Instead of wasting time fumbling with a paper dictionary, you can digest the content of a document at a sufferable speed, and as you re-encounter characters over and over you need Wenlin less and less. I found Wenlin invaluable in law school when I was struggling to learn to read Chinese and get through graduate classes in Asian studies. Wenlin helped me get “over the hump” of learning those first few thousand characters to obtain basic literacy.

Besides providing short definitions immediately, Wenlin also lets you drill down into unfamiliar characters and expressions. In fact, its depth usually exceeded the time I could devote to any thread of tangential study. But its rich features are a big help. When you click on a character in Wenlin, you can hear the character’s correct pronunciation(s) and see the symbol’s etymology, stroke order, and typical combinations with other characters. Seeing the combinations is a particularly powerful feature. The combinations are shown in order of frequency, so that you learn the most common terms first. Combinations are shown regardless of whether the character you began looking at comes first, second or later in the combination. This means Wenlin serves as both an ordinary and a “reverse” dictionary. The display of combinations helped me learn to read. There was some neural magic in seeing the webs of repetition and association—seeing the meaning and pattern of x, xa, xb, xc, xd, ex, fx and so forth. Watching Wenlin draw characters through its stroker order feature also helped, I think, sere characters in my mind.

I still find Wenlin useful. My workaday and legal Chinese is now pretty good–”fluent” is a word I’m skeptical about, but I’d certainly say it’s serviceable. But in reading articles I often encounter unfamiliar literary expressions. Wenlin reliably helps me understand them.

However, Wenlin only runs on PCs or Macs. It does not yet run on Palm devices or Windows Mobile Pocket PCs. When a phone or PDA that runs Wenlin comes on the market, I’ll want that device, but while I am waiting on that I am glad to have access to Wenlin’s DeFrancis dictionary through PlecoDict.