I just did a quick search to find the address for the Taichung Maryknoll center and what should pop up than a newish page (June 22) offering the full text of the Maryknoll dictionary for free in pdf or xls format!! It’s under the Creative Commons license.
A big THANK YOU to the Center and all their linguists for making this available in this way! Although I own the hard copy dictionary, I was thinking I would need to scan the darn thing to pdf.
Now all that is lacking is the iPhone app! 
Downloading right now!!
For Taiwanese, I also find the following site useful:
[quote=“ironlady”]I just did a quick search to find the address for the Taichung Maryknoll center and what should pop up than a newish page (June 22) offering the full text of the Maryknoll dictionary for free in pdf or xls format!! It’s under the Creative Commons license.
A big THANK YOU to the Center and all their linguists for making this available in this way! Although I own the hard copy dictionary, I was thinking I would need to scan the darn thing to pdf.
Now all that is lacking is the iPhone app! 
[/quote]It might be worth exporting the .xls to a text file and then importing it to Anki.
It’s great that they have released these dictionaries, and I believe they will be a real help to many learners of the language. Plans are afoot to develop this data into a fully-featured web-based open dictionary project; if you’d like to get involved, please let me know.
Sure, that sounds like fun.
What I’d really like, though, is the iPhone/Android app – NOT web-based. Eats up too much data when you’re roaming.
An offline mobile application would be ideal.
Well, isn’t that what the actual Anki app is? A native client that syncs with Anki online when you want it to? Haven’t tried it but that’s certainly what it looks like. If you haven’t checked out the Anki site for a while you might be thinking of the widget/web app type thing they had before (though that apparently also had offline storage via Google Gears).
Ankimobile would probably do the trick, but it’s US$25. It looks very nicely implemented, but I’m not prepared to hand over that much to get the dictionary working on my phone.
Actually if you’re using the iPhone a quick and dirty solution would be to turn the spreadsheet into a pdf, then add that to your iBooks library. The iBooks search function is powerful and presents results in a very handy format (i.e. it doesn’t show you the whole page, but rather a relevant passage from the page, which would in this case be the single relevant entry). If I get time over the next few days I’ll try that out.
[quote=“Taffy”]Ankimobile would probably do the trick, but it’s US$25. It looks very nicely implemented, but I’m not prepared to hand over that much to get the dictionary working on my phone.[/quote]Ah, yes, there’s no real point in getting Anki unless you want to do the whole SRS thing. Sorry, I thought that’s what you and Ironlady were talking about but now I see that just getting the dictionary onto the phone is the main thing.
[quote=“Taffy”]Actually if you’re using the iPhone a quick and dirty solution would be to turn the spreadsheet into a pdf, then add that to your iBooks library. The iBooks search function is powerful and presents results in a very handy format (i.e. it doesn’t show you the whole page, but rather a relevant passage from the page, which would in this case be the single relevant entry). If I get time over the next few days I’ll try that out.[/quote]The PDF thing sounds easy and quick. Another option from my “I haven’t actually tried this but it looks promising” selection is Bento. If you got the XLS into that it seems you might be able to set up some interesting stuff.
Dear all,
There doesn’t seem to be a great correspondence between the characters and the Minnan Romanization.
There seems to be more characters than Romanized Minnan syllables for the above three entries.
Here they’ve mixed the characters for “face”. A greater consistency would be welcomed.
Surely, xing1 qi1 isn’t also pronounced li3 bai4 in Minnan.
Not an expert in Minnan but would guess the characters should be 字旁.
Unless, it’s “side” 邊 and not 旁 “side”.
I’d really like a character list with all the Minnan pronunciations in church Romanization as well but still this is a very good resource to have.
Kobo-Daishi, PLLA.
The only Taiwanese in there is in romanization. The characters and zhuyin are Mandarin glosses, not Taiwanese.
The characters aren’t supposed to be Minnan, they’re Mandarin (somewhat classically-slanted to more closely match the Minnan.)
I got an e-mail from them telling me that they are aware there are some errors in correspondence (I mean glaring “this just isn’t the right Mandarin entry for this one” stuff) in the file. They did the dictionary off a Word file which was produced from this file, and all the corrections went into the Word file, which is now unavailable. It’s still amazingly nice of them to just let us have this, even if there are some small problems with it.
I tried converting this to .csv and uploading to Tap Files and to HanDBase – no luck. I think the files are too big. I tried FlashCard (by OrangeOrApple.com, my flash card app of choice) as well but so far no luck – server times out, so file is probably too big. I’ve got an e-mail in to the developer who usually answers amazingly quickly, so we’ll see what he says.
I also did the .pdf thing, but the type is too small to be of much use, and the search function is clunky. (There are detailed English definitions so trying to use it English>Minnan isn’t as efficient as you hit lots of things containing the English word you’re searching on, for example.)
It doesn’t make sense to use SMS on a list this big, as has been noted above. I just want it as a searchable reference.
I’ll throw in NT$1000 towards the cost of getting someone on Rent-A-Coder to do an iPhone app for this if anyone’s interested… 
I know this thread’s been down a while, but I contacted Morrison Iunn (of http://203.64.42.21/iug/ungian/soannteng/chil/taihoa.asp) some while back and he e-mailed me the source file for his dictionary. I’ve added quite a few English glosses to it and hope to augment it with the Maryknoll data, but it’s A LOT more time-consuming than I had anticipated. If anyone wants to take turns at it and divide it up, let me know! There are something like 65k entires, so I’ll be dead before I finish, most likely.
Chiao
Dear chiao,
So, how’s the project going?
Are we likely to see the dictionary soon?
The site you have linked to no longer seems to work.
Kobo-Daishi, PLLA.
Dear all,
I wrote that exactly 1 year ago.
It’s obvious Chiao is not coming back. He’s only ever written 1 post to these forums.
So, does anyone else have a copy of the Morrison Iunn file that he’s talking about or an e-mail address for Morrison Iunn, seeing as his web site seems to be down.
Kobo.
It appears my first guess was correct.
Does anyone have such a list who’s willing to share?
Kobo.
There are a number of dictionaries available which have lists of colloquial and reading pronunciations of Chinese characters. Campbell’s is the obvious one from early Peh-oe-ji history, but there are more comprehensive alternatives available nowadays. If you’re looking for a computer-readable list, however, I’m afraid I can’t help you.
Iunn Ungian’s dictionary seems to move around a lot. Presently it’s here: ip194097.ntcu.edu.tw/iug/Ungian/ … Taihoa.asp
[quote=“Taffy”]There are a number of dictionaries available which have lists of colloquial and reading pronunciations of Chinese characters. Campbell’s is the obvious one from early Peh-oe-ji history, but there are more comprehensive alternatives available nowadays. If you’re looking for a computer-readable list, however, I’m afraid I can’t help you.
Iunn Ungian’s dictionary seems to move around a lot. Presently it’s here: ip194097.ntcu.edu.tw/iug/Ungian/ … Taihoa.asp[/quote]
that’s the one I use, but it doesn’t have the English dictionary part…
What about your project?
Kobo.
I had a couple of interested people, and then I was told to wait for the new version of the Maryknoll dictionary, which was imminent.
Still imminent.