> nerds like Japanese so it's no surprise that Japanese has the best arrangement of apps and websites.
It might not be a surprise... but is it true?
Pleco (for Chinese) seems to reach a standard well above what's available for Japanese, despite the twin facts that (a) Chinese has much less cultural currency in the English-speaking world than Japanese does; and (b) Pleco is not at all a complex app.† It's a dictionary viewer. In fact, it's a dictionary viewer that is not capable of correctly identifying word breaks; you have to handle that job yourself.
My brother and sister study Japanese and they use jisho, which is much worse. When I hassle them about it, they're not aware of anything better.
† In its primary and most useful function. It does have some complicated functionality available, like handwriting recognition and OCR through the camera.
Akebi for Android is pretty good. For a while I used the Nintendo DS Japanese dictionary (Rakubiki Jiten) for the ability to do stylus-based character recognition, which was less frustrating to use than the Windows IME pad feature. Akebi works reasonably well for that function.
I only just started learning Chinese, so I haven't looked at Pleco yet and can't really compare them.
I'll agree with some other comments that once you get into the area bordering intermediate and advanced proficiency there are many fewer resources, but by then you have a better idea of what you don't know, and and can use your existing base to sort of plot a path to fill those gaps.
You make a good point. Pleco is leagues better than anything available in the Japanese domain. I wonder why that is the case - why nobody has stepped up to make an equivalent Japanese app? It might be related to the Japanese publishers not wanting to sell their data. EPWING is an established format and there are plenty of epwing viewers on Android already so I'd guess advanced users will do that instead.
My point was I guess, Japanese has a larger -variety- and quantity of apps. Tofugu and Wanikani are good, we have a really good public domain dictionary (edict), Japanese has the largest number of shared decks on AnkiWeb etc. Not to mention the huge amount of subtitled media available online.
fwiw jisho.org at least handles pasting in sentences and breaking up the words for you. That's 90% the reason I use it!
Would love to hear more about what makes Pleco stand out for you. I make a dictionary app as well (https://nihongo-app.com) and am always trying to improve it.
It has OCR, it can parse text from your screen (screen reader) or clipboard, has male and female recorded voices, handwriting recognition, has about 20 different dictionaries including Chinese->Chinese and Cantonese, character etymology, their own flashcard system, the UI is extremely good. The search supports wildcards but is really fast. They are really attentive too, for example when their userbase pushed back against their flashcard system saying they use Anki, the devs added an extremely powerful and customisable Anki integration too.
To be honest I'm not the target audience for your app anyway, I'm not interested in yet another Edict-based dictionary - there are tons of them around and the quality is not good enough once you get to a certain level.
If you're interested in what makes a good dictionary, as opposed to a good app, I want to note something that I really want but that dictionaries generally do not provide:
Words generally accept several different parameters (known in linguistics as "complements"). If I look up the FrameNet entry for "notify (v.)" ( https://framenet2.icsi.berkeley.edu/fnReports/data/lu/lu9183... ), I see that it belongs to the semantic frame of "telling", with 7 "elements" potentially in play. Those are:
1. Addressee
2. Manner
3. Medium
4. Message
5. Speaker
6. Time
7. Topic
Some of those elements can appear with "notify" because they can appear generally on any verb (like Time, as in "I notified him yesterday"), and some are more specific to "notify" itself (like Message, as in "I notified him of your decision").
The FrameNet entries for notify also tell us how each element may be marked in a real English sentence, and provide examples in which each element is color coded. This is what I want to see in more dictionaries. I particularly want it for elements that are specific to the particular word.
For a concrete example from my own life, I spent a long time being aware that 保护 was Chinese for "protect", and yet I was completely unable to figure out how to use it in a sentence. The issue is that "protecting" involves (a) an agent, the subject of 保护; (b) a person being helped, the object of 保护; and (c) a threat. No dictionary that I consulted indicated how to talk about the threat in a sentence in which the verb was 保护, nor did any of them even feature an example sentence in which a threat appeared. Modeling a sentence on the example of English, in which the threat involved in a protecting action is marked by the preposition from, does not work and will confuse Chinese speakers.
It turns out that the way to mark the threat is to include it in a subordinate clause governed by the verb avoid. 我保护她免挨饿, "I [will] protect her to avoid going hungry", not "I will protect her from going hungry". This is important information if you're trying to speak Chinese! But it's absent from the dictionaries. It is intensely frustrating to know exactly what information I'm looking for, to know that a dictionary is the place to find it, and yet to find that it is mysteriously absent from the dictionary.
This is really really interesting. I wonder if the data from FrameNet would be enough to reliably generate this kind of information in a Japanese dictionary, and if the license supports is usage. I'm going to explore this more, thanks.
- The main panel. You put in characters, and Pleco calls up a list of dictionary entries. As I mentioned above, if you put in several words at once, Pleco will try to call up entries for all of them, but it can't tell where one word ends and another begins, so if you do this you're not unlikely to end up fetching incorrect entries.
- The entry view.
- The stroke order view. Tells you the stroke order for a given character and will play an animation of the same on request.
- The dictionaries. There are a lot of them for different purposes and the quality level is high. This is easily the most important aspect of Pleco.
- Handwriting entry. You get a full screen to draw on like a touchpad. (One character at a time.) Input goes to the lookup field. There is no time limit on drawing the character (as is normal in handwriting IMEs), because this is an app for language learners. This is, obviously, an important way of looking up characters you don't recognize.
- "Reader" mode. When you enter the reader, the contents of your clipboard are laid out. (For this to be useful, you should have some Chinese text in your clipboard.) You can click on Chinese characters to open a popup window with dictionary entries for whatever is highlighted. (This will automatically highlight the character you click on, as well as any following characters that can join with the first one to make a single dictionary entry.) Because Pleco can't recognize word boundaries, there are also controls to directly manipulate what text is currently being highlighted.
- Reader mode also has a refresh button, in case the contents of your clipboard have changed. And a history button to review stuff you were "reading" a minute ago. It is great. I have a common workflow of talking in wechat, copying the message someone has sent to me (can be done with long press), and jumping over to Pleco where the message will be laid out for convenient lookups.
- Pleco also offers "graded reader" addons; books and stories that are written at a simple level and intended to help Chinese learners develop. Those are fairly nice in and of themselves, but when you get them through Pleco there's also an integration with the reader mode.
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Tangentially, a feature that I'd like, as a dilettante in Greek, is the ability to look up every form of a word that inflects. Wiktionary often provides full tables of verbs for inflectional languages (see e.g. https://es.wiktionary.org/wiki/ser#Conjugaci%C3%B3n ), and I would find such tables valuable in a dictionary app. (Pleco doesn't have them and doesn't need them, since the level of inflection in Chinese is juuuuuuust above zero. Japanese has more.)
> My brother and sister study Japanese and they use jisho, which is much worse. When I hassle them about it, they're not aware of anything better.
Not sure if this is exactly what you have in mind, but have a look at https://ichi.moe. It splits a sentence into tokens and then gives you the JMdict entries for each token (i.e. same base dictionary data as Jisho).
I haven't used Pleco that much, so I wonder what you're referring to. Is that:
1. The dictionary app (excluding the dictionary).
2. The built-in (free) dictionaries (PLC and CC-CEDICT).
3. The paid add-on dictionaries.
4. The add-on marketplace.
I think if you want to be fair, you shouldn't compare Pleco to apps based on EDict/JMDict, but rather to apps that can read EPWING dictionaries.
From what I can see and judge:
1. The dictionary functionality in the app doesn't seem any better than EBWin/EBMac/EBPocket [1]. In fact, the EB apps seem to offer more advanced functionality like dictionary groups and different search types (prefix/suffix/infix/exact/full-text).
On the other hand, Pleco is also more user friendly than EBPocket. Replacing dictionary groups by a Chinese-English/English-Chinese is a usability win for 99% of the users.
The Japanese-only documentation and retro homepage probably also deter users from using EBPocket. This is a shame, since the apps are pretty great (they do have English UI). If you just want a dictionary they are miles better than Imiwa/Yomiwa and all the other apps which are based on JMDict.
2. The built-in PLC dictionary seems better than JMDict. It's got better and clearer tagging for the headword and definitions and in-line examples (which you can only get by linking JMDict to another dictionary). These are not issues with JMDict itself though, since it seems to contain all this data (there is even a version that incorporates example sentences from the Tanaka corpus [2]). But most of the JMDict dictionary apps I've seen are not good at displaying it. The EPWING conversions I've found are also not great.
While the PLC dict is great, CC-EDict seems much worse than JMDict.
3. The quality of commercially available Chinese<->English and Japanese<->English dictionaries really depends on the publishers. Compiling and editing good dictionaries take years, and as far as I know Japan has been doing digital dictionaries for a pretty long time. In my eyes, the best general purpose J<->E dictionary (Kenkyusha [2]) is still better than the best commercial C<->E dictionaries, but it is aimed at Japanese speakers studying English and a bit hard to use for beginner Japanese learners.
4. I think the easy to use marketplace is where Pleco really shines. With Japanese dictionaries, you either need to buy the EPWING dictionary in a CDROM (I think it's out of print nowadays) or use the official app, which is pretty limited.
This is the real issue here. I don't know if it's Japanese publishers who don't want to sell the dictionary data to third parties in a marketplace model or the app developers themselves being content with JMDict. It's quite sad, since there used to be a vibrant ecosystem of add-on dictionaries on SD cards for physical electronic dictionaries.
Been thinking about adding EPWING dictionary support to Nihongo for a long time, maybe it’s time to make that happen. It seems to be the only way to get good J-J definitions in particular.
Mostly I mean the paid add-on dictionaries. In dictionaries, you're getting what you pay for.
The interface to the dictionaries is good, but very straightforward. I don't think there's anything magical about it.
> In fact, the EB apps seem to offer more advanced functionality like dictionary groups and different search types (prefix/suffix/infix/exact/full-text).
Those search types are also available in Pleco, but you have to read the documentation to learn about them. The app has no way of teaching you to use them.
> In my eyes, the best general purpose J<->E dictionary (Kenkyusha [2]) is still better than the best commercial C<->E dictionaries, but it is aimed at Japanese speakers studying English and a bit hard to use for beginner Japanese learners.
I think this is a real issue. The native language of the intended audience has a huge effect on how useful the dictionary is for whom. This really shows up in the E -> C dictionaries available for Pleco, which seem to be targeted at Chinese speakers even when they are paired with C -> E dictionaries intended for English speakers. ABC / ABE is an offender there.
But by way of an example of what having a good dictionary means, here are the CC-CEDICT and ABC entries for 以:
-----
1. to use
2. by means of
3. according to
4. in order to
5. because of
6. at (a certain date or place)
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"coverb" [preposition]
1. using; taking - 以合成橡胶代替天然橡胶 use synthetic rubber in place of natural rubber
2. because of - 以盛产红茶著名 famous for abundantly producing black tea
3. in order to; so as to - 以应急需 in order to meet an urgent need
suffix
（"empty" verb suffix) - 加以 add; 给以 give
fixed construction
1. 以 A 为 B: take/regard A as B
2. 以 A 来说: as far as A is concerned
bound form [meanings that the character may express when it is part of another word, but not when it is independent]
from a point on in 以下，以北 [etc.]
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In my opinion, if you're using the PLC dictionary, you're not using Pleco correctly. (CC-CEDICT has lower quality entries, but is nevertheless better than PLC because it has entries that can't be found in other dictionaries, such as the Chinese names of foreign celebrities. PLC has OK quality, much better than CC-CEDICT, but if you're looking for entry quality you should use the paid dictionaries, which are quite far ahead of PLC.)
It might not be a surprise... but is it true?
Pleco (for Chinese) seems to reach a standard well above what's available for Japanese, despite the twin facts that (a) Chinese has much less cultural currency in the English-speaking world than Japanese does; and (b) Pleco is not at all a complex app.† It's a dictionary viewer. In fact, it's a dictionary viewer that is not capable of correctly identifying word breaks; you have to handle that job yourself.
My brother and sister study Japanese and they use jisho, which is much worse. When I hassle them about it, they're not aware of anything better.
† In its primary and most useful function. It does have some complicated functionality available, like handwriting recognition and OCR through the camera.