I've been reading more chinese websites and I would like to download/buy a pop-up chinese dictionary, pinyin is a necessity.

There are so many and I was wondering which one to get. Please post your experiences with the different systems.

The most popular seem to be chinese perapera-kun(web only), kingston powerword/iCIBA, njstar, stardict， Clavis Sinica, wenlin

What are your experiences with these dictionaries?

I have Wenlin, but its annoying and difficult to export websites into text documents if I want to use the reader.

Sorry, I meant Kingsoft not Kingston

I have recently downloaded 有到, and it works well:
http://cidian.youdao.com/

Wow, 有道 is really good!
Much much better than perakun which I had started using.
The example sentences are amazing, and its reasonably fast.
Thanks a lot for this Xia!

Note to other users:
Doesn't work with Google Chrome
You don't need to install the toolbar
Not all words have pinyin
If you use it like a normal dictionary it has no pinyin search.

The nciku toolbar also has this function for IE and Firefox (Windows only at the moment). It looks up words from the nciku website so it has a much bigger word database to draw on than downloaded tools like Pera-kun, and it has pinyin unlike most of the tools aimed at Chinese people.

http://www.nciku.com/tool/toolbar

I'm glad Nciku has released a new tool, their first one was such a disaster I think they stopped offering the download, called Quick Nciku or something.
I might check it out their latest on my other computer.

Hi all, this is a little bookmarklet* I wrote to solve the problem of perakun being web only as ZachH mentioned above. To use it, just create a new bookmark in your browser and call it whatever you like. Then, paste the following code (only what's in between the lines of dashes, not the dashes themselves) into the address field of the bookmark. It'll allow you to paste stuff into your browser window so that perapera kun can translate it. You may want to play around a little bit with the ROWS and COLS parameters to get the box to fit your screen nicely. I'm working from a (rather small) laptop, so I may have them set a little smaller than would be good for you.

------------------------------------

javascript:window.location = 'about:blank'; javascript:document.writeln('');

-------------------------------------

hope some other people find this useful... :)

*check wikipedia if you don't know what that is - basically its a bookmark that automatically does something instead of automatically going to a web address

oops!, looks like the skritter forum's stripped my code a little bit. i've posted the code elsewhere:

http://pastebin.com/f21bfec52

That bookmarklet works great; thanks, J!

@nick - yeah, NP. the other option (which is sometimes easier) is to open the file with Ctrl-O in firefox. Thta only works if it's plain text though.


I have a very limited knowledge of JS, so when I first started writing it, I didn't think Pera-kun would be able to get at the contents of a and I started trying to embed a with /another/ document.writeln() nested in the buttons's onclick attribute to take the value of the textbox and write it to the page as normal text. anyways, it all just got really messy with lots of escaped & nested [']s and ["]s and i had to dumb it down to debug it step by step which is when i finally realized that none of it was needed. :) Boy, did i feel dumb!


Anyways, it all worked out in the end, so enjoy!

whoops, that last post probably didn't make a whole lot of sense thanks to that pesky html stripper again:

@nick - yeah, NP. the other option (which is sometimes easier) is to open the file with Ctrl-O in firefox. Thta only works if it's plain text though.


I have a very limited knowledge of JS, so when I first started writing it, I didn't think Pera-kun would be able to get at the contents of a textarea and I started trying to embed a button with /another/ document.writeln() nested in the buttons's onclick attribute to take the value of the textbox and write it to the page as normal text. anyways, it all just got really messy with lots of escaped & nested [']s and ["]s and i had to dumb it down to debug it step by step which is when i finally realized that none of it was needed. :) Boy, did i feel dumb!


Anyways, it all worked out in the end, so enjoy!

I'm enjoying using 有道, but thanks for the bookmarklet anyway J, very clever.
One cool feature of YouDao is being able to mark words when you look them up on the screen, then they are added to a list. I look forward to the day when I can then dump this list into skritter :D

Google OEM version of 词霸 is free

http://www.google.cn/rebang/product/dictionary/dictionary.html

not sure with Chinese dictionaries, though.

HTH

http://pastebin.com/f58468f60

A bookmarklet for nciku - will look up selected text or prompt for search term if no text is selected. As above for how to use.