Was thinking about getting an ipod touch for use in Chinese class as a dictionary (as well as for Anki when travelling). How do they compare with more traditional electronic dictionaries? Can anyone recommend a particular app? There are a fair few on itunes.

Cheers

I haven't used the traditional electronic dictionaries, but as far as the iPod Touch dictionary app, I think you'd want to go with Pleco:
http://www.pleco.com/
which is pretty sweet.

Pleco is pretty much the first and last word as far as iPhone OS dictionaries are concerned.

It is $35 (with a student discount) but well worth it in my view.

Yea you need to get Pleco, its almost as good as buying one of those dedicated chinese dictionary devices.

It's a lot better than buying one of those dedicated dictionaries to be honest.

Thanks guys! Does Pleco come with a default dictionary, or is that one of the add ons you need to buy? Which would you recommend?

I believe that the initial application is free and then you choose a package from within the application. I think the bundle choices range from a single bi-directional dictionary to all 9 dictionaries that they have available, including the Xiandai Hanyu Guifan Cidian Chinese-Chinese dictionary.

Personally, I have the complete bundle, but focus on using the Chinese-Chinese dictionary as my default, and then use the ABC Chinese-English dictionary and Tuttle Learner's Chinese-English dictionaries to help me with some or all of the words that I don't understand in the Chinese-Chinese dictionary. :) The great thing is that it is Pleco provides the secondary definitions in a pop up window that shows up when you tap on a character or word that you don't understand.

Hope this helps.

Mine is pretty loaded too having transferred from WinMo.

The default dictionary, which is called 'PLC' in the app, is actually A-CE. It's an extremely good dictionary with a lot of fantastic example sentences. It's a concise dictionary with about 80k entries. I find it works well with the comprehensive ABC (C-E) as a fallback but equally the free CC-CEDICT is well worth loading on because that too often has some words (modern, slang etc) which the regular ones wont.

So really the Professional Bundle is definitely worth the extra 50 bucks being as you get those and the bad ass E-C 21st century dict, with 280k entries. This doesn't have pinyin but this much less of a hardship than you'd think in Pleco because you can simply click on anything in the entries and get a pop up saying what those words are.

I also quite like the Tuttle dictionary, it's definitely been useful but you quickly outgrow the tiny number of entries it has. Since you have to buy it specifically, and it costs $20, really you'd be better off going for the Pro bundle if you weren't already looking at it.

As for the complete, you'll get the business dictionary, the chinese to chinese guifan dictionary and tuttle. I've never really found the business one that good, don't really get the use of guifan and tuttle is tiny... so maybe harder to make the case for the extra 50 bucks to the complete.

Either way, the software is substantially less than the higher end dedicated electronic dictionaries but honestly, they don't even come close.

Great advice there, thanks!

Love Pleco too. Can't recommend it highly enough. Pleco and Skritter pretty much cover all my out-of-class study and dictionary needs.

Pleco is awesome! I have the professional bundle. I definitely get my use out of almost all of the included dictionaries.

And as awesome as some of the browser plug-ins are, in my experience the Pleco reader with the professional bundle is even better, seeing that it has several commercial dictionaries as reference material. The downside is that it doesn't always have up to the minute coverage of neologisms and transliterations (the open source dictionaries that are included aren't updated as frequently as with some of the plug-ins, I believe).

I rocked up to class yesterday and the lass there had Pleco on her iPhone just based on me advocating it a week before. She raved about it.

She also signed up to Skritter. There might be some more lately because they've just realised they're going to need to be able to write all the hanzi in the textbook by exam time :)

For other people in my class, this could do with this being promoted to a textbook:
http://www.skritter.com/vocab/list?list=agVza3JpdHIWCxINVm9jYWJMaXN0SW5mbxjFiewMDA

It's hard to find as the search function is so gash.

Chris: CEDICT is pretty regularly updated. I also find the Adsotrans dict is surprisingly helpful for some jargon terms on occasion.

Lurks, sure, I'll promote that textbook. Do you have an English name I can use for it? Also, what level is it--intermediate?

Cheers fella. Meeting China is what they call it in English. It's called just called chu ji ben, which actually means elementary.. Which is quite curious because it seems intermediate by any definition content wise. Crazy Chinese uni text books...

Got it; thanks!

I use KTdict, which is based on CEDICT, and it's free :-).

I'm on android and I use Hanping dictionary. Its a free dictionary which does the minimum very well - But it is nothing compared to the power of Pleco. I used to use Pleco on an old palm and it is truly a beautiful thing!

Wish someone would come up with a premium chinese dictionary for Android.

Yeah doesn't look like that's happening fast. I've spoken to the Hanping guy a fair bit and he's looking at licensing a dictionary but it's not going to be a Pleco-level thing.

Christian: Have you looked at the Pleco demo?