Kindle chinese-english dictionary

[吴端端]

Hi everyone,

 

I have been looking forward to start reading real chinese books on my kindle. But it seems I can't find any chinese-english dictionary on the web.

Has anyone been able to find this?

 

Thanks for your help

[ForrestEJ]

Assuming you mean online dictionaries that you can download for the kindle, I cannot help you much on the Chinese as my level is not there yet... but:

 

I did/do the same thing with Korean on my iPad - and did so by downloading Korean E-readers. I found a few of them had Korean-English dictionaries or the ability to search online within the app for English definitions that worked much better than the kindle version.

 

The way the Korean language conjugates verbs makes it difficult for non-Korean specific dictionaries to know what you are trying to look up. I have a feeling Chinese dictionaries on the kindle might have difficulties splitting characters and whatnot as well (or I could be 100% wrong).

 

So, while I did not exactly answer your question, if it is an option, I would maybe check out some Chinese e-readers - it is what I will be doing in the future because of how helpful it has been for my Korean.

 

Best of luck!

[CJGait]

I have an English-Chinese dictionary that works on the Kindle. I might take another fling at Chinese-English with the built in Bing translation (I'm using it on a couple of French books so I can use the Grand Ricci). But if you really want to get a good machine assisted translation system Pleco outshines anything you could do with Kindle at the moment. It parses words and phrases and displays all the entries from all the dictionaries you have on the phone/tablet. I have a quite large collection of their dictionaries and have sold all my paper ones. I simply no longer have any use for paper dictionaries with Pleco available. They even have the Hanyu Da Cidan and the Grand Ricci (thus the sudden desire to learn to read French on my part, it's the absolute best dictionary for classical Chinese, ancient documents, history, etc.).

[hedwards]

Are you copying the text into a dictionary? Otherwise, I'd recommend Pleco if you have an Android or iOS device to run it on. If you don't have that, I'd recommend McGraw-Hill's Chinese Dictionary and Guide to 20,000 Essential Words: A New Method for Non-Native Speakers to Look Up the 2,000 Most Commonly Used Characters in Chinese .

 

It's rather unorthodox, but I tend to use it to figure out what the pinyin is for the character I want to look up is. It's not a Chinese-Chinese dictionary so the definitions are going to be approximations, but it beats not being able to look up a character at all because you're not sure how many strokes it has and which radical the character is being indexed by.

[Zeppa]

You know there's a built-in Chinese-English dictionary in the Kindle, don't you? It isn't much good, of course.

For English I was able to download a big dictionary to replace the Kindle native one, but no such luck with Chinese.

There is a Chinese-Chinese dictionary and a Chinese-English dictionary on the Kindle. I am using the Kindle App on an iPad. You should be able to call up a list of dictionaries, perhaps by touching or clicking on a word you want to look up, and you choose the Chinese-English dictionary, and it remembers that choice.

 

I definitely prefer Pleco. In fact, I have tried converting a Chinese book made for Kindle into a PDF and then for Pleco, using Calibre, and it worked on a short one. The built-in Kindle Chinese dictionary is just not good enough.

[roddy]

Has anyone checked to see if different / better dictionaries are available if your Kindle is registered to Amazon.cn?

[ouyangjun]

I believe there are additional ones you can download, but the ones I fond were mainly for native speakers wanting better English dictionaries.  I believe the ones on Kindle work fine for reading if you're okay with C-C dictionaries.  I mainly use the Kindle C-C and if the definition is too complicated I will reference Pleco.  

 

Below are the 3 dictionaries I have.  I can't remember if I downloaded any of them separately or if they came with it (note my Kindle is registered in .cn China Amazon).

 

现代汉语词典 － Chinese to Chinese

现代汉语词典 － Chinese to English

现代汉语词典 － English to Chinese 

[Lovinlearn]

There should be one already on the kindle. http://edublog.net/wp/2014/07/26/kindle-paperwhite-chinese-english-dictionaries/ I assume (though I could be wrong) that all the models would have something similar.