Not sure how many of you use a PDA. If you use Palm OS, I highly recommend these two programs:
Anki (http://www.anki.com) - a flashcard system. I used to write my own flashcards and had about 4 small boxes of them before a friend found Anki. I’ve already compiled Sh-Da’s Book 1 and Book 2 (Part I) using Anki’s database builder and uploaded them to their community forum.
Oxford Concise C&E Dictionary (http://www.pleco.com). Not an exhaustive dictionary but definitely the most common words with Pinyin, the ability to zoom in on characters for clarity, radical lookup, simplified and traditional characters, and the best feature: handwriting recognition look-up (for when you only see a character with no pronunciation key or definition).
Hope these softwares can benefit you as much as me.
Pleco is planning a much more extensive E<>C dictionary by the end of this year, BTW. It will be a separate product from the Oxford dictionary they now offer.
Anyone who has used both Anki and Supermemo and can compare the two? From the website it looks like Anki doesn’t have a learning algorithm like Supermemo’s.
I stupidly bought the new Tungsten T2 without first checking to see if HandDragon is compatible with the new OS. Now I have to use CJKOS and the fonts in Supermemo are total crap. Since the characters look awesome everywhere else, I’m thinking it also has somelthing to do with Supermemo. Anyway, I wouldn’t mind switching to something else if it had features comparable to Supermemo’s.
I don’t think anything else can have features similar to Supermemo’s. The algorithm is pretty complex and undoubtedly patented.
I suppose the only way to get greater flexibility would be to buy the desktop version and use that. I fancy doing that anyway at some point in the future, because it has quite a few more features.
I emailed them about this (back when I was using a different OS) and they just said it’s old and wasn’t made to support Chinese Fonts. I haven’t asked them if they’ll upgrade it yet.
I’m thinking about getting a laptop next time I’m looking for mobile devices and being able to use the PC version of Supermemo is one of my main reasons. The power of supermemo lies in it’s algorithem. I wouldn’t even think about using something else. Before I found out about Palm Dragon I was already a serious user (with the crappy graphics), I developed a work around to it.
I’m localizing their application into Spanish for them, so I’ll try to put a little pressure on them to get some decent-looking Chinese font support. Probably a lost cause, however.
The fonts do look terrible in SuperMemo under CJKOS, but I don’t want to play around with the system because everything is working and that’s good enough for me, right now…
At least Miltownkid and I can openly agree about SuperMemo!!
I really think every Chinese language learner should at least check this program out and see if it’s a match for them. Those of you that get attached to it, will probably never want to let it go.
One more thing. I’m not sure which Palm you have, but when I was testing the different Chinese OS’s I had 3 on my Palm all at one time with no trouble. After I found out which one was best I just deleted the other 2.
I want to get an electronic C-E dictionary, what are the pros and cons of using a PDA instead?
Can PDA C-E dictionary software do the same things the electronic dictionaries do, most importantly recognize characters written on the touch screen and give definitions based on English input? If so what are the system requirements to run the software? And how would price compare (the dictionaries seem to run 5K-9K)?
For these Chinese - English dictionary software, do you need to purchase a PDA in Taiwan? Would a PDA purchased in the states be able to run Chinese recognition software? Thanks!
The pleco dictionary does everything that mistercrips asks, look up in pinyin, radicals, or even drawing it.
and it works fine on an English OS without the need for any other software.
My OOOOLD palm IIIxe could run oxford pretty well. So just about any palm you buy wil run Oxford well. It’s a little pricey at $50US though.
There is the much cheaper option of using kdic and the free cedict dictionaries. I actually like the CJKOS character recognition more than Oxford’s and the dictionary is a little more flexible, so I still use it at times even though I have Oxford.
There is another character learning program caled King Kanji - it’s the only one i’ve used so I can’t compare but it certainly helped me some.
Anki (http://www.anki.com) - a flashcard system. I used to write my own flashcards and had about 4 small boxes of them before a friend found Anki. I’ve already compiled Sh-Da’s Book 1 and Book 2 (Part I) using Anki’s database builder and uploaded them to their community forum.
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