Pleco Chinese Dictionary
By Pleco Software
Open iTunes to buy and download apps.
Description
Pleco is the ultimate Chinese learning companion - an integrated Chinese dictionary / document reader / flashcard system with fullscreen handwriting input and live camera-based character recognition, from a company with over a decade of experience making mobile Chinese learning software.
Major features:
• Great dictionaries: the built-in one has over 20,000 example sentences with Pinyin, the popular CC-CEDICT is available as a free add-on, and 7 other wonderful dictionaries are available as paid upgrades.
• Live Optical Character Recognizer: look up words simply by pointing your device's camera at them, or by tapping on them in a still image. (paid add-on)
• Fullscreen handwriting: use the entire width of your iPhone's screen to draw characters. Extremely accurate, with a recognition engine licensed from China's leading maker of handwriting input systems. (paid add-on)
• Flashcard System: create a card from any dictionary entry with a single button tap, import premade word lists, use advanced memorization techniques like SRS (spaced repetition), and study in a variety of modes including fill-in-the-blanks handwriting and tone drills. (paid add-on)
• Powerful search: look up words by Chinese characters, Pinyin (spaces and tones optional), or a combination, with support for wildcards and full-text search.
• Cross-referencing: tap on any Chinese character / word in any dictionary entry to bring up its definition.
• Audio Pronunciation: instantly hear a native-speaker audio recording of each Chinese headword; recordings are available for over 34,000 words. (paid add-on)
• Stroke Order Diagrams: animations showing you how to draw each character; over 20,000 characters are covered. (paid add-on)
• Document Reader: open a Chinese-language text file and look up unknown words simply by tapping on them. You can also look up characters on web pages and in Word / RTF documents via the pasteboard. (paid add-on)
• Mainland- and Taiwan-friendly: supports both traditional and simplified characters (in dictionary definitions, stroke order diagrams, searches, and the handwriting recognizer), and (experimentally) supports Zhuyin as well as Pinyin for headword search and display.
• User dictionaries: create new dictionary entries right on your device as you encounter new words. (paid add-on)
We also offer excellent customer support - send us an email and see for yourself - and an active user community in our discussion forums at http://www.plecoforums.com. And we're constantly working to make our products better; our sales and customer base have been steadily growing for 10 years across three different mobile platforms. You can be confident that we'll still be fixing bugs and adding new features for years to come.
Though our software is sold only through in-app purchases, those purchases can be transferred to other devices that sync to your iTunes account just as with any other iOS software; simply load up the free version on each device, open up the "Add-ons" screen, and tap on the "Restore Purchases" button to activate your purchase on each device.
Customers who already own our software on another platform should check out our website at www.pleco.com for upgrade / license transfer options.
Please contact us at support@pleco.com, via the form at http://www.pleco.com/contact.html, or using the "Contact Support" button in the "Settings" tab within Pleco with any support questions - we'll be delighted to hear from you.
What's New in Version 2.2.11
Still hard at work on our next big update, but here's a smaller one in the meantime to add support for the new iPad and fix a few bugs.
NOTE: if you have a flashcard session in progress, please finish it before installing this update, or (if you've already updated), cancel it and start a new one. (sorry about that - minor data format change which we forgot to check for in our session-saving code)
Changes:
• Added optimized icons / graphics for the new iPad's high-resolution display.
• Added support for launching Pleco from other apps via the x-callback-url protocol. (plecoapi://x-callback-url/s?q=(whatever you want to look for))
• Changed the appearance of characters in traditional mode to better match the normal style in which they're drawn in areas that use traditional characters.
• Changed the behavior of the character set toggle button so that it now applies app-wide regardless of which screen you tap it in.
• Improved the appearance of PLC dictionary entries by adding more white space between example sentences.
• Added an option to disable keyboard click noises in the tone bar. (we'll do this automatically in our next major update, but we can't do it without dropping support for iOS 3)
• Updated our audio files to make them louder and fix some errors.
• Fixed a bug that could cause the review of incorrect cards at the end of a flashcard test to show the wrong cards if you made extensive use of the "back" and "forward" commands during the test.
• Fixed a bug that could cause audio to occasionally fail to play correctly when very rapidly advancing through flashcards.
• Dozens of other minor tweaks and bug fixes.
The first of this year's two major updates is shaping up nicely and should hopefully be out in a few months; we apologize that it's taken so long, but we've spent most of the last 10 months on another project which you can find out more about on our website.
Improvements planned for that update, 2.3, include a dictionary user interface redesign, some great new features like merged multi-dictionary search and example sentence audio, and something like *8* new add-on dictionary databases.
iCloud-based flashcard sync (rather than just backup) is on tap for a second, more flashcard-oriented update later in the year, along with a bunch of other long-awaited flashcard enhancements and some interesting reader / OCR ones too.
To keep track of the latest Pleco updates, follow us on Twitter (twitter.com/plecosoft) or Facebook (facebook.com/plecosoft) or sign up for our email announcement list by sending a blank email to pleco-announce-subscribe@pleco.com.
Also, we'd really appreciate it if you'd resubmit your product reviews - by default, iTunes only displays reviews for the latest version, and the average star rating gets reset each time we update our app. (note, however, that your new review will only count if you've updated to the latest version)
Thanks for using Pleco!
Customer Reviews
Great Chinese learning resource
Pleco is not only a Chinese lookup dictionary. If you only use it for that, you're missing out on a lot.
The basic dictionaries will solve most normal lookup needs, but Pleco also has additional dictionaries for in-app purchase to cover your additional needs (the prices for dictionaries are mostly set by licensing agreements with the publishing companies, they're inline with what you'd find if you walked into a bookstore to buy a hard copy of the same dictionary).
The best thing about Pleco is all the other features it combines all in one program:
* The document readers a very functional e-book reader, and makes it very quick and easy to lookup words you don't know without having to distract too much from the material you were reading.
* The built-in flash card program is very quick and easy to use, and uses sophisticated algorithms to space the repetition to maximize the learning.
* The OCR uses the camera to recognize characters you see in real life (the hardest part about looking up Chinese characters is figuring out how to even begin to search through the dictionary for it. The OCR feature solves this very elegantly; you just take a picture and Pleco has figured out what the character is and pulled up the definition for you.
As an avid Chinese learner, I use Pleco practically everyday. It's even on my quickbar because I use it so much. Most of the time my routine is to read a couple chapters of a Chinese book, looking up the words that I don't recognize and adding them to a flash card list. Then later on I use the flash card part to review the words I just added, so I can help remember them better and slowly look up fewer words in the futures.
Pleco has already greatly increased my learning speed and now I can look forward to gaining more Chinese fluency.
Thesaurus????
Overall this dictionary is phenomenal. If you guys can add a Chinese "thesaurus" for an add on that would be sweet!!!! Does anyone know if there is a Chinese thesaurus app? I'm tired of saying the same words over and over again. Please add a thesaurus!!!!!
Indispensable
I study Chinese in a university. We learn to speak but not many characters. I'm using this app to teach them to myself. It has made life very easy, this is by far my favorite app. I am constantly finding new features, this app can do A LOT.
Customers Also Bought
- Free
- Category: Reference
- Updated: Mar 21, 2012
- Version: 2.2.11
- Size: 18.8 MB
- Language: English
- Seller: Pleco Software
- © 2012 Pleco Software Incorporated and its licensors
Requirements: Compatible with iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad.Requires iOS 3.0 or later
Top In-App Purchases
- Optical Character Recognizer (Educational Discount)$11.99
- Optical Character Recognizer$14.99
- Full-screen Handwriting (Educational Discount)$11.99
- Flashcard System (Educational Discount)$11.99
- Full-screen Handwriting$14.99
- Flashcard System$14.99
- Pleco Complete Bundle (Educational Discount)$99.99
- Pleco Basic Bundle (Educational Discount)$34.99
- Stroke Order Diagrams (Educational Discount)$7.99
- Document Reader (Educational Discount)$7.99
