We are different than Pleco in multiple ways, I will try to explain some of them and later on I will try to make a video to help clarify this in the future.
We have both Taiwanese Mandarin and Mainland Mandarin as different languages on our platform (dictionary, grammar, sentences, and articles)
Mandarin Chinese is a diverse language with hundreds of regional dialects. We help to understand differences with clear labeling and explanation. Imagine trying to learn English but you just throw in Irish, British, Australian, and US variations without clear labels or explanation. That is the problem with learning Chinese today but multiplied by a factor of 100.
For instance, most Chinese learners in Taiwan have heard that the words for taxi and bicycle are said differently in Taiwan vs the mainland. But when you search on taxi on Pleco, 計程車 is the fourth result, and there’s an unhelpful tag “DIALECT” next to it (see the image below for a simplified example of one out of thousands of examples on our platform)
We do not simply switch between traditional and simplified characters because that can never capture the complexity of the problem and will result in loss of data after each conversion. Instead we have mapped out thousands of cross-strait words and different variations of characters on a deep level manually
Sometimes, simplified to traditional is one-to-many or many-to-one
For instance:
- simplified 复/覆 vs traditional 覆 (fu4)
- simplified 烟 (yan1) vs traditional 菸/煙
Sometimes, there are multiple variants of a character with slightly different meanings
For instance:
- 台/臺/檯 (tai2)
We are data-driven by default which makes it easy to keep track on everything you have learned to customize and merge different types of resources without duplicates.
This means that you can import multiple different course book (word list and labels) or other resources and we can automatically help to filter out the things you already studied. But there are a tons of other things that we can apply, for instance just a simple thing as filter out search results and generating example sentences that are personalized just for you are some of the cool things we can do.
Our platform allows users to dynamically connect flash cards to resources on our platform and then update their cards when new information has been added.
For instance, new translations in different languages or improved sentences for your cards. You can either decide to automatically update with the recommended settings by the community or detailed decide what information to synchronize without losing your progress.