Quick Links:
Books
Beginners | Intermediate | Advanced
Gadgets
Portable electronic speaking dictionaries - again, I don't have any of these to review yet.
Software
Windows (affiliate page) | Pocket PC

Partner Dictionary English-Chinese

NEW - Special Offer!

Ectaco are now offering a 20% discount link for this dictionary.  To take advantage of it go to:

>>> 20% discount off the Ectaco Partner Dictionary <<< (affiliate link)

  I downloaded my copy of the Partner Dictionary from Ectaco's website and it installed and ran first time without any problems at all. I was given the option to install a Chinese font but as my device already has the traditional Chinese font 'MingLiu' installed I chose not to do this.

The evaluation version of the dictionary only contains about 10% of the terms ('A 'to 'B') until it is unlocked with a registration code.  All of the features are fully functional though.

Languages

The interface to the program is switchable between English, French and German. Note this only changes the text within the program, the entries for words and phrases are still listed in English.
There are not many text strings which would need to be translated in order for the program to support more languages so it might be worth mailing Ectaco if you are interested in them adding new ones.
The dictionary entries contain English and Mandarin Chinese (romanised using Hanyu Pinyin). There is sadly no Cantonese version available although I have been told by Ectaco that they hope to release one in the future.

An impressive 400,000 words and phrases are claimed to be in this dictionary.

When in English-Chinese mode you are presented with an alphabetical list of words and phrases. You can either scroll through this list or jump quickly to a particular set of letters by typing into the quick search box. The phrases seem to be extensive and include compound words which do not have one word translations (eg: leader of an enemy), modern terms (eg: standards compliant, Internet browser), scientific terms (eg: Ohm's law, DNA) and idioms (eg: "dodge a pit only to fall into a well").

There are also many esoteric words such as 'crepuscular' and 'dibbling' (the latter means 'to plant with a dibble' - I had to look it up!).

Some entries have additional links, for example, under "man" there is a link to a phrase meaning "equality between men and women".
When you click on a word the lower window shows the characters, pinyin and whether the word is an adjective, verb etc.

I couldn't tell what order the Chinese characters are listed in but you can search quickly through the list by pasting or entering a character into the search box.  Character entry is performed either by the radical method or by typing in the correct pinyin.  The radical method requires that you can identify the key radical of a character  (this would be necessary for most written dictionaries anyway).  You can select the radical from a list, filtered by the number of strokes in the radical and the program then lists all possible characters.  You can filter this list down by selecting the number of strokes left in your character, after the radical has been written (again, this is the same as a normal dictionary).  In practise, this method works well, providing you know your radicals and correct stroke counts!

Pinyin entry simply involves typing in the Mandarin pinyin and selecting the correct character from the given list.  The list can be greatly refined if you also know the tone of your character - for example, entering 'xiang2' instead of just 'xiang' reduces the list from over 70 characters to 10. (this is explained in more detail here)

Once a character is found a large number of compound words and phrases are shown below it.

Additional Features

So far the handheld dictionary has performed pretty well but you would be forgiven for wondering what benefit it gives you over a normal printed dictionary.
Well apart from the obvious benefit in that it is convenient to carry such a large reference work around on your handheld computer, the program has some additional features which are unique to a software dictionary:

Using the query tab, the dictionary will search on a character (or sequence of characters) to find all phrases in which it appears in.  This is helpful in learning new compound words and phrases.  In the screen above, I searched for all terms containing the character 女

The program allows full control over the font and fontsize for the Chinese characters which is extremely useful when learning how to write new characters. It is easy to temporarily increase the fontsize to something like 30+ points in order to be able to see every stroke.

Finally, the user is given the ability to maintain two independent lists of English and Chinese words.  These function as bookmarks to entries that you want to remember (which makes me think the option should be called "bookmarks" rather than "filtered").  This feature definitely saves time as you can see a new character in the dictionary and add it to your personal list with a single click.

The 7 pages of help provided are adequate and should be enough to get you started.

Stability

In over a week of use I haven't managed to crash the application once. I have also not noticed any problems having it loaded in memory when running other applications such as Pocket Explorer or Mazingo. Occasionally the display of the main dictionary became slightly corrupted when flipping between Chinese and English views but this resolved itself within a second or so.

Speed

The dictionary would be of limited use if it ran slowly. Thankfully almost everything works quickly, from starting the program to navigating the interface or performing searches.  The only area in which a slowdown is apparent is when selecting characters using the radical method.  When clicking a radical there is a noticeable delay of several seconds while the program lists all the characters that use this radical.  During this time my pocket PC was locked as if it had crashed but once all the characters appeared it reverted to normal.  A workaround for this is to ensure that the number of strokes for the character is set to the desired value and not "*" (which displays all characters).

As with any Pocket PC software, you would be advised to download the evaluation copy to ensure that it runs acceptably on your device.

I noticed that every time I started up the program that it defaulted to the Chinese view but had my friend's name in the search box. This was rather confusing until I found the "Paste on activating" setting in the options screen. This option evidently starts the program with whatever you have in your WinCE clipboard, which could be useful but should perhaps not be switched on by default, (although it is possible I accidently turned this on).

I also came across a few spelling mistakes in the main English list.

Bugs

When switching between the Chinese and English views your current position is lost and you are returned to the top of the list. Not only this but the 'query' tab is also cleared so searches need to be repeated.  This is annoying and I can't see any reason for it, hopefully this will be addressed in a new version.  (I think this is a bug as the help states that the query list "will be kept until you exit the application or run Search the next time. [sic]" )

The main feature missing is of course Cantonese romanisation - without which the dictionary can only ever be of limited use to a Cantonese student.  If you are interested in a Cantonese version of this product being released then I would urge you to contact Ectaco to show that there is a demand.  It is perhaps unrealistic to expect a fully Cantonese version to become available (with dialectical characters and colloquial phrases that are not used in Mandarin) - but simply changing the pinyin to jyutping should be possible.

Pocket PC's now have far more storage space available than those of a few years ago. At the time of writing I can add up to 2Gb of compact flash storage and still have an SD memory slot free.  A smaller 128Mb memory card can be added for about $50 US.  For this reason I think it would be feasible for a future version of the partner dictionary to contain links to a sound file for each character tone.  In this case it would be nice to be able to install "soundpacks", so the dictionary would be switchable between Mandarin and Cantonese. 

A small feature that I found myself wanting was within the filtered list option discussed earlier. If there were an icon to randomise this list it would serve as an effective Flashcard generator.  As it is, you can still use your custom list of characters for this purpose but the position of the characters in the list is always the same - ie: your "flashcards" will always be shown in the same order.

Finally, it would be nice if there were some way of filtering for just idioms.  I tried to fool the query tool by searching for ">>"  (phrases and idioms are prefixed with these characters in the main list) but sadly this didn't work.  The frustrating thing is that idioms are classified as "[ID]" so it must be possible to perform a search on them somehow.

Hopefully some of the developers involved with the Partner Dictionary product range will read this review and let me know the chances of the features I have suggested being added.

Conclusion

Anyone wishing to improve their Chinese reading and writing skills will find this dictionary to be of enormous benefit in learning new characters, words and phrases.  If it only had an option for Cantonese it would be perfect...

Rating:

Would you like to comment on this review or view any updates? (there is additional information about the dictionary in the comments). 

> > Download the Chinese-English Partner Dictionary < <

> > View All Chinese Dictionaries by Ectaco < <

If you do not wish to use an affiliate link I have provided an alternative below which will not generate any revenue for this site. 

Finally, Ectaco also do a Japanese version of this software, which I understand is newer than the Chinese version.  You can find out more or download it below (affiliate link)

Quick Links:
Books
Beginners | Intermediate | Advanced
Gadgets
Portable electronic speaking dictionaries - again, I don't have any of these to review yet.
Software
Windows (affiliate page) | Pocket PC