| Picture this: you’re watching TV with your Chinese friend and her family after a nice dinner at their house, but when everyone bursts out laughing at the MC’s funny quip, you just don’t get the joke. Or, imagine that you’re reading a Chinese news article on your computer or phone and are cruising right along when you suddenly stumble upon a confusing combination of characters that throws you off track. In either of the above situations, having a trusted, accurate Chinese-English dictionary at your disposal will allow you to continue using Chinese and enjoying your life in China without missing a beat. Here are two top dictionary apps for your phone.  Pleco Pleco is one of the most popular English-Chinese dictionaries. Featuring a clean and intuitive interface, Pleco allows users to look up words by simply typing the English, Chinese characters or pinyin (no tone marks necessary) into the search bar. A database of useful results appears, ranked in order of most commonly used entries. In addition to Pleco’s basic dictionary function, some of the app’s most functional elements are the handy extra features you’ll find located in the left-hand sidebar, such as the clipboard reader. To utilize the clipboard reader, just copy a chunk of text (from a WeChat message, for example) and paste it into the reader box. Then, as you scan along, simply tap any characters you don’t understand and the pinyin/definitions will automatically pop up! While the basic version of Pleco is free, the app also hosts several paid add-ons, including an OCR (optical character recognition) feature which allows users to hold up their phone’s camera directly to characters they’re reading in real life (say, on a menu or billboard) and scan the text, which is then processed within the Pleco app. Hanping The Hanping Dictionary app, currently only available for Android users, is another helpful Chinese-English lexicon that’s roughly comparable to Pleco. In addition to a basic dictionary, the free version, known as “Hanping Lite,” features a handwriting recognition tool, audio pronunciation by a native speaker and an impressive database of example sentences for each word. For a fee, the “Hanping Pro” version includes a tone-pair soundboard to help users practice pronouncing tones and flashcards. |
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