Which Electronic Dictionary Do You Use?

My Nokia N70 cell phone's free dic...the best and most portable for me! :) It's got English and Chinese phrases, can easily find words. Not as good as the Pleco and stuff for Palms, but it is free for Symbian 60 phones!!! Much better dictionary than Wenlin and even paper ones in look up speed.

Can someone remind me how to switch to Chinese input mode using CJKOS on Palm OS? I can't for the life of me remember or work out how to do it.

The electronic dictionary I use is a Golden Dictionary MD 8500 which overall is really GREAT but the placement of the buttons isn't the greatest, the space bar and backspace are right next to each other and the same size so I'll often try to hit one and inadvertently hit the other. There was one I looked at in China which was WONDERFUL (but I already had one) It's made by a well known MP3 manufacturer (Oppo I think) these hand held dictionaries are definately the way to go!

I live in Hong Kong and have not been able to find a portable electronic dictionary that has both pinyin and characters. Does anyone know one?

Rich, Would you share a bit more how to access English-Chinese, Chinese-English dictionaries on you phone? Is it just software that you where able to put on the phone? Do you need a special input software? etc etc Thanks,

Any good ones worthwhile that you can use a stylus to input the characters? I heard that some dictionaries are primarily for Chinese speakers learning English. I want to avoid those.

If you can find it on the internet, download the software called Powerword or in Chinese 金山词霸 (jinshan ciba). I use it all the time for a laptop, it's not portable, but the software lets you highlight any word in any text and translates it. Not sure if this helps. http://www.mydown.com/soft/200/200968.html

for hand helds http://www.pleco.com/ has pinyin and characters and is for foreigers learning Chinese not for native Chinese speakers. It has recognition of handwritten characters which is invaluable when looking at non electronic characters ie on paper http://www.mdbg.net/chindict/chindict.php?page=main for laptop which has pinyin input and shows you ALL words with a given character or pinyin not just those starting with that character - good for learning. But it does have a full complement of words

Sorry I meant that http://www.mdbg.net/chindict/chindict.php?page=main does NOT have a full complement of words

Is there a pleco version dictionary for traditional characters?

http://www.mdbg.net/chindict/chindict.php?page=main try this one

Anyone use the AM101? http://www.bbkusa.com/am101-electronic-english-chinese-translator--dictionary-with-two-ways-sentence-translation-voice-chinese--english.asp Here's a video about it on Youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ePM9lAgxsiE

Speaking of PlecoDict, a great resource, no doubt...but I have continued to have difficulty importing my vocab lists from CPod to my PDA/Pleodict. Also any hints on importing "phrases"? I think the bug is that I can't get my Palm to read Hanzi characters in Memo Pad. Has anyone else had this problem? Thanks. AY

我在不同的情况使用不同的词典。 我的手机上的词典很不错.我坐地铁的时候总是在看书，使用手机的这个小词典很方便。在电脑还有一个从网上下载的另外一个叫clavis sinica的词典.可是我在家里放松的读书时不喜欢依靠电脑，就用正常在纸上出版的词典，更舒服参考。

For phrases and sentences on a Palm, if you have CJKOS and your own translations ready, this is brilliant: http://www.dolphin-world.de/software/vocabulary.php Download the full package for docs etc, but use the latest beta, it's beta in the old sense (ready for release but let's check first). I've found the betas to be safe and reliable and feature rich.

Another good electronic dictionary is the Besta 無敵 CD-628. It's got some very cool features like real voice, for English AND Mandarin, so you can really get a good handle on the pronunciation, it comes standard with like 9 dictionaries, so if one dictionary doesn't have the word you're looking for then you can opt to search all of them to find it. The whole sentence translator 全句翻译 is pretty decent. It can play MP3's and MP4's and has a scheduling calendar, and a Theasaurs among other nifty tools, however the interface for a non-Chinese is pretty lacking. If you look up a word in the standard dictionary, it won't give you the pronuncation in Pinyin, you'll either have to listen to the real voice pronunciation or highlight the word and switch it to another dictionary that contains Pinyin...HOWEVER much of the time that other dictionary doesn't have the word, so you'll have to highlight one character at a time to get the pronunciation in Pinyin and I can't tell you HOW CUMBERSOME this is. The root of the problem is that this particluar dictionary wasn't built with the foreigner learning Chinese in mind, it was built for the Chinese learning English. A comperable dictionary is the Golden Dictionary 快譯通， MD-9288. While it doesn't have the real human voice feature, it has a much simpler interface that always contains Pinyin (and you can switch to Zhuyin if you want), it has a 10 language dictionary built in (with Japanese, Korean, French among others) and still does MP3, MP4, Video, Audio recording, has a scheduler, appointment book, Calendar etc. (all the same tools the other has) and you can download many more dictionaries and study guides to a standard SD card that expands the Dictionary 10 fold. Out of the who I'd have to recommend going with the 快譯通 MD 9288, it's much more stuitable for those of us studying Chinese.

from http://www.pleco.com/: "The iPhone only supports web-based software (Google Maps etc), so there won't be a version of Pleco for iPhone anytime soon. Sorry!" I could not live anymore without the Pleco dictionary, this is why I will stick to my Pocket PC.

xiaohu, do the ones you mentioned support Cantonese as well?

The MD 9288 has better Cantonese support but it's limited to Cantonese pronunciations of Mandarin character combinations in its "10 Languages Dictionary " and Cantonese basics which does have colloquial Cantonese but it's just the basics to get by. Although I'd have to say it's not too bad considering really complete Cantonese learning resources are pretty limited these days. This dictionary even has lessons for basic Taiwanese and even Hakka! (Kejia) with real voice pronunciation!

PlecoDict supports both traditional and simplified characters. You just select which one you want to use inside the app.