Im so excited that im actually gonna break my own rule, and write this in ENGLISH.

This is only partially skritter related, but I feel its my responsibility to spread the word to others who study Chinese about this great phone app (I think its available on both iphone and android, I know it works great on the latter).

Do you feel that reading chinese books is a great way to study Chinese but also feel its too much trouble always bringing a dictionary because you have to look up words every minute? Do you feel that it takes away the joy of reading, that it takes too much time and makes it boring and discouraging? I sure did, and thats the reason I never finished the books I started.

However, with this app called pleco reader, you can read books directly on your smartphone and every time you run into a word u dont understand u only have to touch it and an explanation with pinyin and everything will popup in a flash. It's so fast its ridiculous. It feels like you are reading a book in your own language.

You can download any chinese novel online, save in txt format, and just open it with the reader. It has bookmark functions etc so u can close it and when u start it next time u will be right where u left it.

It might sound like im getting paid or anything to say this, but its just that I have been looking for a program like this for SO LONG, and now when I found its working so good im kind of ecstatic!

It would be great if "add to skritter" somehow could be implemented to the reader, so that u can automatically add words u dont understand to ur vocab list.

Now I dont have to feel bad about keeping this to myself anymore. I sure wish that someone would have done the same for me! I just found it by accident.

I usually use the free downloadable 有道词典 on my computer to read texts. It allows you to do the same thing, but on a desktop computer by hovering your mouse over the word. Pleco is indeed my favorite dictionary though and I'd probably do more reading if I could do it on my phone. Nice to hear a positive review of it!

Regarding the "Add to Skritter" app: I'm the developer working on it. Unfortunately I can't add options to other apps directly, but I am working on another way around it to make adding from other apps a little easier. For now, I think turning Add to Skritter's auto-paste on is the fastest way to add things.

Perapera Firefox extension will do a similar function for navigating Chinese websites. Just enable it, hover the pointer over the characters, and the definition with pinyin pops up. There are other extensions for IE and maybe Safari that do the same thing(i think).

I have to agree about Pleco. Been using it now for 3 years, started on Palm, switched to iPhone, now my wife has the Android version. It is probably the single greatest Chinese language tool I have for everyday use, I take it everywhere!

I haven't used the reader much though, except to try it out. What are some recommendations for good Chinese novels to try to read. My level is probably upper intermediate - beginning advanced?

I agree, Pleco is fantastic. Despite having reservations at first, it's now invaluable. I've got the free version of the OCR reader for example - it only gives you pinyin in the free version, but that's enough to make the dictionary easier to use if you don't know stroke order. The pasteboard reader is also great - if you can copy and paste any block of text you can read it in Pleco for free :).

Looking forward to iOs app integration too, apparently Skritter -> Pleco is sorted but Pleco -> Skritter is harder as you mentioned above.

On the PC, http://zhongwen-chrome.blogspot.co.uk/ is great for the same purpose and can add to Skritter too!

@jonnybostwick, I used to use all the browser extensions, but felt they were too confined to the browser. The 有道词典 is much more universal (unless you're using a mac). It works over all browsers, text documents, most drop-down menus, chat programs, pdf's and many more.

http://cidian.youdao.com/

Agreed about Pleco.

For those looking for a similar (non-Zhongwen plugin) version, I'd suggest the Mandarin Spot Annotate Bookmarklet found here:
http://mandarinspot.com/annotate

You can also use that site to create vocab lists from a given text, sorted by frequency in a corpus or within the text or HSK level. Very useful for prestudying some book vocab before jumping in.

This is very helpful. I tried Perapera for Firefox, but it was not available. Then I managed to get the youdao dictionary installed, although I didn't really understand what I was doing (I only know about 200 words...). I suppose I just clicked 'next' and did a standard installation. Now, if I select a character/word on a Chinese website I see 'youdao' popping up and can see the English translation. Great!

Personally, I like the free Pablo for this purpose. Small (4 MB), fast and updated on a regular basis (the last update was last Tuesday).

http://ehaton.blogspot.com/2007/02/learning-chinese-pablo-my-personal.html

- English, Chinese and pinyin
- Search a character from its radical
- Find a character from its various elements
- Simplified and traditional characters
- Quick navigation
- Popup definitions in other programs

- All graphical interface
- Handwritten character recognition
- The best collection of character animations (4,500 characters)
- Navigate through search results with one click
- Based on the acclaimed CEDICT database, over 90,000 entries.

Pleco is absolutely fantastic on the iPhone though.

I like pleco, its great.The reader is very very good.

pablo for windows is not bad(few annoying quirks and doesn't like running on pc's with some debug libraries installed and can't get commodo antivirus to stop flagging it as a virus)

Pity it doesn't work with windows 8 yet and there isn't any thing like it for linux or mac. Would love to have the time to make a pygtk or wxpython app

I like the mdbg reader for windows and their dictionary "plugin" is good on mac.

Don't ask them to add more features to the ios skritter app, it'll never get finished

It is fantastic. I have only about 800 characters, but maybe a couple of hundred more I half-recognize, and I've been reading Yu Hua's novel Huozhe on the iPod Touch with Pleco Reader. And also with the translation. Am at page 82 and it's getting better. I could never work my way through this without this function (Wenlin might work too).
Margaret

I use the pasteboard reader on Pleco and I really like it - so much so that I will probably buy the Pleco reader to read some books. One question though: how do you get the .txt versions of the books you would like to read? Are there sites or anything? Also, how do you put the text versions of the books onto the iphone?

Thanks.

I recently had the pleasure of meeting the guy who wrote Pleco (I forget his name - Mike something?). He was a very nice guy, very humble. I told him I thought Pleco had about the most devoted fans of any single app I've found; the reviews on here (and in other forums) have been really pretty amazingly positive.

James

@WoodenFrogs:

I am a bit of a (re-)beginner but I gather most Chinese novels are available online. I bought mine as a book, and I also downloaded the text. I found the link in a discussion on Chinese-forums.com where some people wanted to read a novel together. They also linked to an audio version, which I haven't looked at.
Another source is the forums at Pleco.com. They exchange and discuss materials.

Margaret

Pleco reader is simply awesome. I use it at least 1-2 hours per day, and more when I'm traveling! How in the blazes did people study Chinese before Pleco, Skritter and Anki? Oh, wait, I remember ... I tried that for three years.

@wodenfrogs. For texts you can as mentioned above get them when you buy on line books or download free ones from the net. Some sources:
http://china.panlogicsoftware.com/ebooks.html including the famous classical Dream of the Red Chamber,Romance of the Three Kingdoms,Journey to the West etc. Other can be: http://www-personal.umich.edu/~dporter/sampler/sampler.html#fps etc. You can also download movie transcripts from e.g. shooter and read those. I do that a lot my self since it helps me a great deal.

To get them in to Pleco you can start Pleco and then start the reader. Click document file reader and then upload / download files. On that page you will see your device IP address and port it listens to. Note that and open an web browser on your home computer. Type in that address and you are brought to an page where you can select files from your local computer and upload them to Pleco. Once uploaded they will be available on your device even when off line. Note that you need to be on the same WiFi to get this to work. You should also be able to sync via Itunes but I have never done that my self.

Thanks a ton for the responses @zeppa and @mandarinboy.

I find it much easier to add text files using iTunes. Click on your iPod, click on the apps tab, then scroll down to Pleco and upload files. For Android, you can just drag-and-drop files to any folder you like on your sd card.

i would love to do that but embarrassingly i am so low tech i dont know or understand how to do those things...(mostly cuz i am old). ive got pleco on an iphone, and i am hoping to run into someone using it at a coffeeshop here in beiing and asking them to give me a run-through on how to use it. ive been using the dictionary for years though.