Besta electronic dictionaries

[ptran]

Does anyone have experience with the Besta 8000 electronic Chinese dictionary that is sold by chinesemall.com at:

http://www.chinesemall.com/beox80eldi.html

I looked on www.besta.com.sg but could not find this 8000 model. All the Besta models shown on this site have models like CD-72, CD-75, but not 8000.

Are there 2 different Besta companies?

I'm trying to learn Chinese. However, most electronic dictionaries are for Chinese people trying to learn English. Can somone recommend an electronic dictionary with good Chinese-to-English lookup capability? I want something with character input recognition so that I can just write on the screen to look up a word.

Thanks.

[roddy]

There's a thead on electronic dictionaries here where I think Besta are mentioned. I'll leave this one open though, as it's a more specific discussion than that one.

Roddy

[geraldc]

Get a palm and one of the pleco dictionaries, it can basically recognise all the characters I throw at it, now matter how sloppily I've written them. I've found that with some dictionaries the character recognition relies too much on correct stroke order.

[ptran]

Does your Pleco have voice pronounciations in both Mandarin and Cantonese? Those are 2 must-have features for me.

[roddy]

Pleco doesn't have any audio. I think it's been raised as a possibility for a future release, but there's none now.

[geraldc]

Once you've got the rudiments of pinyin pronunciation, you really don't need an audio dictionary. I've got an old instant dict somewhere and half the time you can't hear the voice, so you just stop using the audio function.