Does anyone recommend the "complete bundle" for pleco ? I know that pleco is great, but I'm not sure I need the biggest bundle. I'm leaning toward the "professional bundle", but if someone thinks it's worth another 30 dollars to get the "complete bundle", I'll probably do that.

The complete bundle gets these additional dictionaries:

NWP English-Chinese Dictionary - US $9.95.

Xiandai Hanyu Guifan Cidian - US $39.95.

Tuttle Learner's Chinese-English Dictionary - US $19.95.

Cheng & Tsui English-Chinese Lexicon of Business Terms - US $19.95.

Here is a link to all of the pricing for pleco:

http://www.pleco.com/ippricing.html

I find the Tuttle dictionary useful for its sample sentences, but it only has them for the more basic words. I use the Cheng & Tsui business dictionary a lot, but it's English-Chinese, not Chinese-English. I think there is a Murphy's Law corollary for Pleco that whatever dictionary you don't have will contain the word you need, so if you can afford it I would say buy them all. Its surprising how they differ. Even if they do have the same word, the nuances come through differently in different dictionaries, so when I am unclear on word usage I will try all available dictionaries in Pleco.

Bohan,

You can demo all of the dictionaries. In the Add-ons tab, select each dictionary you want to demo. There is a "buy now" button, and a "demo" button. You can download each dictionary and demo them, to see if you want it or not.

But if I were you, I'd skip the bundles and just get the Xiandai Hanyu Guifan dictionary. You are at a really advanced level - you are probably at the point that a Chinese-Chinese dictionary makes sense.

okay, well, since I now know that I should have the Xiandai Hanyu dictionary, and that there's a Murphy's Law corollary for Pleco, that makes this an easy decision: get the "complete bundle".

Thanks a lot guys~~

I like the way you can tap on characters in the Chinese-Chinese dictionary and get the definition, just like you can with texts.

The extra dictionaries should be even more useful when (and if) the Pleco multi-dictionary search rolls out...

Definitely not an "if", as multi-dictionary search is already supported on Android (it's just an off-by-default experimental option) - getting multi-dictionary search working great for 95% of searches is easy, it's that last 5% with weird situations like 历年 (two different words in traditional, 歷年 and 曆年, that converge to a simplified word with two different meanings) and 台湾 (is it 臺灣 or 台灣? even Taiwan's own government isn't sure) and editors' maddening inconsistency regarding neutral tones (some treat them like any other tone, some add a mark to indicate that a tone *might* be neutral but also show a non-neutral tone, some ignore them altogether) that make it time-consuming to go from "experimental" to finished.

Guifan is probably our best bet for advanced users at the moment, though it doesn't have as many entries as ABC - however, we have other considerably larger C-C dictionaries coming, so if you can content yourself with a cheaper bundle for now you might find that you like one of those better than Guifan (which some of our users feel is actually too wordy / learner-friendly in its definitions).

That's awesome- glad to hear that multi dictionary search is getting close on iOS, I've seen a few estimates come and go on the Pleco Forums.

With that last 5% of cases, could there be some simple fall back when there is an inconsistency or a duplicate such as just having multiple entries appear in the results list?

Yeah, this is why I generally don't like doing release date estimates - too many factors to accurately predict, and it creates dissatisfaction with our existing software that wouldn't exist otherwise; I think Nick et al have the right idea by refusing to say anything specific about the timing or feature mix of future updates.

And that's actually what we do in the experimental Android version, but it's generated enough complaints (and creates enough problems down the line for things like flashcards) that we really want to fix it more thoroughly.