The Best Online Chinese Dictionaries and Resources to Learn Chinese
As a Chinese language learner, if you are not living in a Chinese speaking country, you might find it difficult to choose the right words to say at the right moment. Apart from attending your regular Mandarin Chinese class, you probably need some help online to facilitate your learning. In this blog, we have collated a series of online Chinese study resources to speed up your learning process. They are tried and tested platforms that have helped our students in learning Chinese.
Chinese Dictionaries
For the Chinese learners to consult an authorized and powerful dictionary, we would like to recommend the following Chinese study Apps or website to suite different needs:
Pleco
This app is frequently used to facilitate Chinese teaching and learning. It is available both on Apple Store and Google Play. There are some unique features that make it stand our from the other Chinese online dictionary. It includes licensed dictionary databases from Oxford, Longman, FLTRP, and many other major publishers.
Optical Character Recognition (OCR) With the help of OCR, you can search any Chinese word on a still image using the camera of your device. It speeds up your search productivity and comes in handy when the word is foreign and you do not know the Hanyu Pinyin.
Handwriting and Voice Input It accepts both 手写(shǒu xiě) handwriting and 声音(shēng yīn) input, which make it easy for Chinese learners to look up words that you either only know how to write or how to pronounce.
Audio You may be tired of hearing Chinese words pronounced by the robots. Try Pleco, it has 34,000 Mandarin words pronounced by native speakers.
Flashcards (Add-On) Their customised flashcards system covers all vocabulary from HSK 1 to HSK 6. It is an essential tool for Chinese learners who would like to take the HSK test. You can also import your own Chinese vocabulary list using this App.
To find out more information about Pleco, you can access the following website and Facebook page:
HanDian 汉典
This is a very powerful tool for both Chinese teachers and Chinese learners. It is suitable for intermediate to advanced Chinese learners as the site is only available in Chinese.
3. MDBG Online Dictionary
This comes with a clean interface and the site is easy to navigate. When you search a new word, it comes with Pinyin and tones. MDBG offers search in both simplified Chinese and traditional Chinese.
4. Written Chinese Dictionary
Written Chinese has a very colorful website. Besides online dictionary, it also contains a lot of other Chinese study tools.
https://dictionary.writtenchinese.com
5. Google Translation on the App Store (English to Simplified Chinese or Traditional Chinese)
This tool has both web and App versions to translate English to Simplified Chinese or Traditional Chinese. The Hanyu Pinyin and audio pronunciation will also be shown and played.
https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/google-translate/id414706506?mt=8
6. Yellow Bridge (Mandarin-English Dictionary & Thesaurus)
Yellow Bridge Chinese-English and English-Chinese dictionaries have more than 200,000 entries, including thesaurus, word decomposition and example sentences. The same URL supports both desktop and mobile access.
Besides the online dictionaries, the Yellow Bridge also offers a wide range of services and resources. However the site is a ad-supported site. Sometimes, you might find it a bit annoying to see so much ads running on the site. To remove the ads, you may purchase a membership with them at $29.95 for six-month subscription.
https://www.yellowbridge.com/chinese/dictionary.php
7. DeepL
This is the first internet search engine for translations and it is a free machine translation system powered by AI. The accuracy and quality of the translation is relatively higher than other translation products in the market. It has both web and App access which come in handy for language learners who want to search up the meaning of complete sentences. To access their service, click the following link:
https://www.deepl.com/en/publisher/
8. YouDao Dictionary - 有道词典
This dictionary comes in both web and App forms. It is suitable for learners who want to know more examples on how use certain words and phrases appropriately. There are many credible dictionary sources embedded in it, including Oxford, Collins, A New English-Chinese Dictionary and Modern Chinese dictionaries. Also, it has multiple language inputs you can use, including English, Japanese, German, Korean, Russian and even French.