「萌典」Free ChineseChinese Dictionary (iOS/Android)

Since I first wrote this post there have been two updates to the app I’ve updated the post accordingly. (3/6/2013)

By chance I came across a new dictionary app for iOS and Android devices called 「萌典」(you can also find it by the English name “MoeDict”). It’s sourced from the Revised Chinese Dictionary put out by Taiwan’s Ministry of Education（教育部「重編國語辭典修訂本」）so it has official support. Let’s take a look at this brand new dictionary! Pictures are below the break at the end of the post.

What’s Good

Overall, it’s a very nice looking app. It’s bright, not too cluttered, and presents plenty of useful information. It’s retina-screen friendly if you’re in the need for that. Each entry has the pronunciation in both Zhuyin and Hanyu Pinyin, as well as the radical and number of strokes. The dictionary entries have some example sentences, much of which is pulled from classical literature or other historical documents. I like that because it provides some interesting historical and ancient context, which is helpful in some of my own research.

I really like just how simple it is. There’s no excess of information, no excess of graphics. Just a button for information and another button to clear/go back (admittedly this button’s use can be a bit unclear; sometimes it goes back, sometimes it clears the search bar). You get the information you need and that’s it. Slick!

Another great feature is the ability to click on and look-up words within the definitions themselves. While this is limited to selecting either single characters or phrases, it is still a quick way to get a better understanding of the entries themselves. To clarify, you can’t click and drag the cursor like in many other apps to select single or multiple characters to copy. And, while it does have a copy feature within the dictionary entries, it only copies the link to the internal dictionary and not the character itself. However, you can copy the character from the top of the entry; just not from the definitions themselves.

One thing that surprised me the most was the ability to use the dictionary online and offline, without needing any large downloads. I was quite impressed with that.

In a recent update, they’ve also added some new search features:

• Like most searches, you can add an asterisk or two periods between two characters to search for related phrases:見*萌 見..萌（will return 見微知萌）
• In addition, you can also search with a space after or before the character to search for phrases with that character either at the beginning or end of the phrase: 見<space> or <space>見

What’s Not So Good

Now the downsides. First of all, there’s no audio pronunciation for the entries. However, with great resources like MDBG, Skritter, and Pleco, you can easily find the audio elsewhere. Also, if you’re using a pure Chinese dictionary, you’ll likely be at the level where you won’t be needing the audio anyway. And, as this was meant for native speakers, so it isn’t surprising that it lacks audio.

Secondly, and this one is a little more annoying, is that the app seems slow. I ran it both on my iPhone and iPad (both fairly new devices, purchased within the past year). On both devices it was a bit slow. It would take a few seconds for some presses to work. I found myself hitting things more than once, thinking it hadn’t registered my press, when I just needed to wait. This, while frustrating, is a minor issue and likely to be worked out in a future update.

Indeed this has been fixed! The app moves a lot faster now, I’m quite impressed. The updates came fairly quick, too.

Conclusion

As this is still a fairly new app (released February 19th, 2013) there’s plenty of time and room for some of the little glitches to be worked out. That said, it’s a fantastic dictionary. It works offline, is universal for both iPad and iPhone, and has an Android version as well. While it lacks some of the more powerful features of, say, Pleco, it does provide a nice free alternative to their Xiandai Hanyu Guifan Cidian（現代漢語規範詞典）.

Overall, there’s some minor annoyances and weird interface choices, but it’s a lovely free dictionary that will work well for you.

Related Links:

Online version：http://www.moedict.tw/
Android App：https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.audreyt.dict.moe
iPad and iPhone App：https://itunes.apple.com/app/meng-dian/id599429224

Images below

 

Ask questions for answers you already know

One habit that I’ve picked up is asking questions for answers that you already know. While that sounds a bit silly, it’s really great practice for the variety of answers a question can have. At the same time, it’s good way to lead into other questions.

For example, even if I know how to get to the library/bathroom/7-11/etc. I still like to ask every so often just to practice. Since I already know where they are, I can learn how they would describe getting there in Chinese, and what variations they can use.

 

Is organic really organic?

There’s always a few characters that form combinations seemingly different from their individual meanings that always cause me to double take. One of particular menace has been the word for “organic” in Chinese.

有機
“have” + “machine” = “organic”?

WHAT.

So, suffice it to say I’ve always been curious as to how this seemingly contradictory nugget came about in Chinese. So, to the internet we go!

Breaking it Apart

Now, 有 (have) I don’t think really needs any explanation. Here it simply means just that. But what do organic foods have that requires this word in the Chinese translation?

It was 機 (machine) that posed the real trouble for me. So I ran off to my favorite online Chinese dictionaries (sorry you won’t be finding this definition in your basic English<–>Chinese dictionary! Okay, yes, some put in “organic” in the definition but it misses out on some of the true beauty behind Chinese characters that can only be found in the original definitions. Or I’m just crazy).

Anyway, the definition listed for 機 is: 「有生命的生物體器官的作用」which shows that it can be used for describing the parts of living things. That is, things that are alive. So, in a sense, 有機 could be read as meaning “have life”. Which can further be taken to be used in the Chinese name for “organic chemistry”–有機化學, which has carbon–a basic fundamental building block of living things–as its basis.

So what this all breaks down to is something which has life is something that is natural. This means that when something is organic, it doesn’t have any of those nasty man made chemically mucking things up.

Of course I could just be really over analyzing this and ought to just say 有機=organic and leave it at that.

 

Reflections on Last Month’s Tadoku

The first Tadoku of 2013 is over! That month went by so fast. I am really impressed with the records people have made this round, many breaking over one thousand pages a month. Definitely a huge congrats to them! I believe I stayed in the middle with around six hundred or so pages, and I’m quite happy with those results. I am sure I could have done more, but that’s for the next round For now I’d like to reflect on what this round meant to me, and why I still firmly believe Tadoku is the greatest passive aggressive challenge available to language learners.

What This Round Meant

This is the first Tadoku round I’ve done while working my full-time job and being a full-time graduate student. So, my time was quite limited. To me, this Tadoku round was more to see what else I could squeeze into my already packed day. I tried to limit my updates to materials I read for fun, and less that I had to read (be it for school or translation work, etc).

Once again, Tadoku proved that you can always find a way–and the time–to work in reading in your target language. “Busy-ness” isn’t really a good enough reason; and to be harsh, it’s really just an excuse. We have daily obligations, such as work, but we are only as busy as we make ourselves. So why not re-evaluate your time and busy yourself with something fun in your L2?

For the curious, my daily schedule is as follows:

6:40-7:30am (wake up, shower, get dressed, breakfast, catch the bus)
7:30-9:00am (travel time, arrive at office)
9:00am-6:00pm (work, 1.5 hour lunch break)
6:00-8:00 (travel time, arrive home)
8:00-8:30 (dinner)
8:30-sleep (free)
Weekends (free)

Often that “free” time is often not very “free” and is taken up by studying–reviewing articles, studying Japanese/Chinese, organizing thesis, etc. However, there was still plenty of time I could squeeze in. Such as reading while on the bus instead of sleeping through traffic, or reading during my lunch break. There’s also great variation each day, some days I would work late or have errands and chores come up cutting more into my free time. In essence, “life happens”. Yet I still read 600 pages this month. So can you.

Why Tadoku is Important

Tadoku to me is not important for the challenge part, but rather for motivating me to find the nooks and crannies within my daily schedule where I can read something, even if only for a few minutes. Every little bit helps, and as Lan pointed out in this blog post on Tadoku, you’ll find it benefiting other areas of your language learning as well (unfortunately my organ and piano happened to both be on loan at the time).

And, as I said before, I find reading acts as its own SRS:

The text, then, acts like an SRS system for itself. That is, the text, as you read, will automatically reinforce the words that you’ve already looked up at the start. As long as you have a good idea of what they mean, you’ll see a wide range of uses for it in context.

Even if you don’t Tadoku, it is still a good idea to go back and take a look at your schedule. Where can you fit some time in to read? Play a video game? Do anything fun in your L2–the key being fun. Don’t make it a chore; instead fit some L2 fun time into your daily schedule.

It’ll work wonders.

 

The Problem with Defining “The Hardest Language to Learn”

This is something that kind of irks me. Often I will see friends or friends of friends post links to info-graphics or websites that categorize languages from easiest to hardest to learn. It starts with languages that are similar to English, which it then classifies as “easier” for a native English speaker to learn. Then it goes on, listing languages that are further away in similarity to English, finally ending up with Chinese, Japanese, or Korean as the hardest language to learn.

This information is great…

….if you want to be completely intimidated about learning Chinese.

….if you want to establish a virtual barrier in your mind to Chinese, that it is too hard to learn.

….if you want an excuse to not learn it, or to not learn it well.

I suggest avoiding this kind of information as it’s only useful in intimidating you.

The fact is, anyone can learn Chinese. Anyone. It doesn’t matter how old or how young you are. You can do it.

When you’re fluent in Chinese, you can come back, bring those charts to a high school reunion and show off how smart you are to those jerks from second period look at those charts and laugh

 

Technically Dependent

I had the pleasure of meeting up with a buddy of mine, and 2x the more diligent student, Joe (you can catch him on Twitter). The issue of technology in language study came up, especially in relation to Pleco, the Chinese dictionary available on most smart devices. Now this isn’t say Pleco is inherently bad–it’s a fantastic dictionary which looks like it’ll only get more amazing once the new version (finally) gets released. What is more of interest here is how technology, and this sense of instant access, influences studying another language.

This is probably turning into an old debate of new versus old, technology versus books, but I still think it is an important aspect of our language learning that we need to at least concern ourselves with.

Basically, it came down to this: Pleco, and other dictionaries like it, suffer from Google syndrome–that is, information is instantly accessible. The answer is right at our finger tips, and as Ian Malcolm famously stated:

…it didn’t require any discipline to attain it. You didn’t earn the knowledge for yourselves, so you don’t take any responsibility for it. You stood on the shoulders of geniuses to accomplish something as fast as you could, and before you even knew what you had, you patented it, and packaged it…

Okay maybe that’s a little extreme, but what I’m getting at here is that the knowledge we obtain from these instant access dictionaries required no effort to obtain it. Handwriting recognition is great, and has saved me large amounts of effort, but I never felt I learned much more about the character than a quick pronunciation or “oh okay”. It never really stuck. Sure, no-one wants to lug around a 1,000 page dictionary around with them (unless you’re me), but there is something magical, something satisfactory with a sense of accomplishment that comes with looking up the word by radical or stroke count (not by pronunciation please!) and gaining the knowledge about it yourself.

Not to get too Old-Man-In-Viridian-City on you, but ‘back in my day’ we didn’t have these fancy dictionaries. I had to look up everything by paper dictionary. It was tiring. It was time consuming. It lead to many ripped pages from frustration. But, you know, I remember those characters the best.

I doubt anyone will run off and remove Pleco (I sure won’t), but I wonder, perhaps, if we made it a bit harder to use–restricted look ups to by radical only, avoid handwriting or pronunciation input and use it in a more “classical” way, we might avoid Google syndrome and start learning.

 

MCBs and Anki 2.0

This post is a reflection on my experiences with MCBs, mentioned by Jeff弁 over at his blog. You can read all about them here and in this follow-up post, both worth checking out in their entirety. MCB’s, to quote Jeff are:

The general idea with these cards is that, like MCDs, you have a card with some amount of context and a single element that you test yourself on. However, instead of cloze-deletion it uses bold to bring your attention to the piece of the card you are focusing on.
(emphasis added)

In many ways it is basically a reverse cloze-deletion, where instead of trying to guess what the content is, you’re focused on trying to recall what the content is. I have to say, in my brief experience with it (about a week) that it seems two times more effective that MCDs ever were. I find my retention is much stronger and it is easier to recall the word actively rather than passively. This goes for grammar too, as Jeff mentioned he will mark certain points in blue, which I have done as well:

So, for example, I mark this specific sentence structure with blue so I learn to recognize it.

Now, how does this all play into Anki? After the huge update to Anki 2.0, I decided to give it a go again. Recently all my SRS decks have gone stagnant. So, I went through and deleted all my old decks and have since started fresh. You have no idea how relieving that was! Now I’m off to a fresh start, with MCBs guiding the way. The most useful addition is the ability to create parent and child decks, like so:

This way, I can focus my studying on grammar points, Classical Japanese/Chinese, or, by selecting Japanese or Chinese, the whole thing mixed together. This has really helped a lot. As such, my new method of inputting cards reflects this structure–while also making the most use of each phrase. For example:

After adding this new card into Anki, I can select where I put it. So, perhaps I can focus on grammar (blue) or vocabulary (bolded), then place it in its respective deck. I also will flip the cards around and use the content in other ways:

So here’s the same card, with the term I want to focus on in bold. But the content has been reversed to focus on Chinese with the Japanese below. This way I reinforce what I am learning from both sides. However, I try and keep the information on the back of the card specific to what I want to gain from the front. What this means is that, say I have a sentence I am studying the grammar structure for. I only keep that grammar information on the back–even if there’s terms on the front I cannot 100% read or recall. Like the famous adage KISS (Keep It Simple Stupid), I don’t want to clog up my cards with more information than I need to. That is why I make separate vocabulary and grammar cards. Before I tried to jam too much on there, making them very tiring to go through and I often just glossed over most of it anyway.

Also, I make sure to go under “Fields” and activate the “Remember last input when adding” option, so that it retains the content for me to change what I want to bold, color, or where I wish to place it. It’s super helpful.

I definitely suggest giving Jeff’s MCBs a shot, they’re a pretty effective way of doing it. Don’t forget, also, if you have Anki follow this guide posted by Lan for creating filtered decks to make your reviews even more effective!