Coming Soon: Word Decomposition

By popular demand, the next release of DianHua Dictionary will include Word Decomposition. As you can see in the screen shot below, the definition page now includes entries for all of the components of a word. You can touch any of these entries to go to their definition pages. Also, notice the "Entries containing..." option. It will search the dictionary for any entry that contains the displayed entry. Both options can be incredibly useful when reading something that has words you don't yet know.

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joec - excellent idea.

|2009-12-14 11:04:19

This is a great idea. You should look at the Japanese dictionary application
Kotoba! for more ideas like this for improving your application. You might also
improve your flash card system by implementing some intelligence system (cards
you answer correctly more often gradually appear less often) such as that seen
in Japanese Flip. Sound support on the flash cards would also be great.

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Jason

|2009-12-14 22:29:51

Thanks for the recommendation. The Difficulty sorting algorithm is meant to
achieve an approximation of a more sophisticated algorithm. I will definitely
improve it over time.

Sound support for Flashcards will be coming soon.

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arsan - graduate student

|2009-12-28 20:23:19

DianHua is such a great application. Can you please make a version of DianHua
for Cantonese? Better yet, an integrated version that has both the Mandarin &
Cantonese pronunciations. Thank you and great work! Kemal Arsan, Columbia
University, NYC.

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Jason

|2010-01-04 20:07:31

Thanks for the feedback. I'd love to make a Cantonese version, but I don't see
it being terribly useful without Cantonese Romanization. I've made some
contacts trying to license data that would help me do that, but I've been
unsuccessful. If you have any recommendations on how/where to source the data,
I'd be happy to build it.

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TElmo

|2010-01-28 09:50:22

Hi Jason,
Just wanted to let you know that I appreciate your work very very much
and on a daily basis. I live in Beijing and your app is what has been the most
useful complement to my chinese lessons by far.
Indeed word and character
decomposition (like in KTdict C-E dictionnary: look up character/word) would be
great, I could delete the latter from my itouch ahah!
Agree with Joec's
suggestions for flashcards

Thanks!

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Jason

|2010-01-28 17:29:45

I have definitely fallen behind on my original schedule and should have put out
an interim release with a few of the smaller new features. My goal now is to
provide an update by March at the latest.

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Jonathan Baldwin - Very useful!

|2010-02-14 12:07:21

I like dianhua's flashcard tool but a couple of things would make it much more
useful: integrated pronunciation (rather than having to switch apps),
pronunciation of words and phrases rather than just individual characters...

I
discovered the syncing of bookmarks via the website today and this is *really*
useful as I made a mistake earlier and it has saved me a lot of time! But it
would be useful to be able to move words from folder to folder via the website
(I see it's possible in the app, but drag and drop would be good ;-)
Also,
reordering of bookmarks would be handy.

Another idea would be sharing bookmark
lists. For example people studying a particular course could share a bookmark
folder for each class... might be a killer feature to make your app something
that teachers recommend.

(sorry - that's a long list!)

Also, loving the export
to CSV and Excel. I use Numbers on the Mac more than Excel but it can open these
...

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