Comments on: Nciku.com - My Review

By: ellen

ellen — Wed, 15 Oct 2008 14:32:38 +0000

I love nciku. I actually like that it mixes the English and Chinese definitions - it’s as if you’ve looked for it in both an Eng-Chin and Chin-Eng dictionary at once. You can search in pinyin, English, or characters, and it automatically detects which you’re searching in.
I also use it to look at stroke order and direction, and for the example sentences, which are sometimes translated and sometimes not (so you sometimes have to think about the meaning for yourself, a good thing).

Finally, I am pretty sure that ‘ciku’ is ‘ci’ as in words, and ‘ku’ as in ‘cool,’ not sure about the ‘n’ but that makes it easier to remember.

By: Dan

Dan — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 04:37:42 +0000

The pronunciation engine is licensed from another organization.

By: Jim Mahler

Jim Mahler — Sat, 05 Jul 2008 01:00:35 +0000

Your review of NCI-whatever is right on the mark. I usually use one of the simpler sites (like http://www.godict.com), and turning to NCIKU only when I can’t find the answer elsewhere.

Also, there’s a new meta-site that will search several dictionaries automatically: alseek.com/dict.

By: Albert

Albert — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 11:45:24 +0000

Dan,

Glad you found the review useful. I’ll look forward to the updates to the dictionary. By the way, is the pronunciation engine yours at Nciku or did you borrow it from somewhere?

By: Dan

Dan — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 04:50:52 +0000

Albert,
Thanks for the review. I’m glad to see the conversations getting some love. (I edited quite a few of those.) We have some changes to the dictionary portion that will come online in one month.

I appreciate the no-holds-barred comments about the pronunciation engine. We can make some tweaks and check out any improvement.

Don’t feel too bad about raking our name over the coals; you aren’t the first one to do so. It’s that double consonant at the front there that trips people up.

Thanks again for the review.

By: Albert

Albert — Sun, 29 Jun 2008 21:55:40 +0000

I guess I should mention that I find MGBD, no, MDGB, oops! I mean MDBG a hard name to remember as well. So maybe I’m not the best one to be talking about that. And I’ll admit, my domain name doesn’t really flow trippingly from the brain unless you know some Chinese already.

By: Beijing Sounds

Beijing Sounds — Sun, 29 Jun 2008 11:37:00 +0000

Albert, glad you’ve done this review. I think you’re a bit below the belt on the “hard-to-remember url” front, but that’s probably just because I’ve got one of those alphabet soup urls myself.

The pronunciation problems, though, very much deserve to be pointed out. I’d never spent enough time on nciku to listen to them. Yikes. If I were the product manager, I’d retire this one immediately, even in beta, and go looking for an entirely different synthesis engine. You were too gentle. It’s even worse than nothing at all — bound to emphasize the worst aspects of Zhonglish. The erhua is not even worth discussing, but the one that hurts the most is the 3rd-2nd tone example. This is an especially tough one for foreigners, in particular for hapless Americans who are always having to say měiguó and end up with something sing-songy like méiguó. To have this reinforced on a language-learning site is really unnecessary.

That said, nciku deserves praise for what they’re trying to do and I’ll be the first to give them credit for the handwriting recognition component. I’ve been thinking about a comprehensive review of the site as well as mdbg.net, but I’ve spent little time on either since I got my Plecodict with the ABC Dictionary.

By: Nicki

Nicki — Sun, 29 Jun 2008 06:54:34 +0000

Yes, the nciku one is much faster for me. There is one on http://www.yellowbridge.com too, but that one is even slower than the xuezhongwen one. I like yellowbridge for the example sentences, as well as the other words beginning with/ending with the same character. They even give words that sound similar. http://www.chinesepod.com has example sentences in their dictionary now ,too. I often study with all those sites up and look up the word in all of them to get a fuller understanding and lots of examples.

By: Bao Mingguang

Bao Mingguang — Sun, 29 Jun 2008 06:51:41 +0000

Nice article about nciku.

Please check out Learn Chinese Words:
http://www.learn-chinese-words.com

I have recently assembled “metasearch” style dictionary lookup tools for English and Chinese. No need to hunt for the best Chinese-English dictionary when you can search them all at once!

Like nciku, my dictionary search is in “beta,” so please be kind with the criticism and lavish with suggestions.

I’ll be adding new resources as I find them, starting with Jim’s suggestions above.

包明光

By: Albert

Albert — Sun, 29 Jun 2008 06:45:08 +0000

Nicki,Yes, I think that is very cool too. But I just use the one on http://www.xuezhongwen.net. There’s a little icon of a paintbrush to the right of the search button. Click that and you can draw away (but stroke order matters). If you’ve used both, I’d be curious to know which one you like better. I did notice that the Nciku (hey, it’s almost an anagram of your name!) handwriting input loads faster than the one on http://www.xuezhongwen.net.