Android CEDICT Chinese dictionaries: QuanWei vs Hanping
Android is still way behind the iPhone in terms of breadth and quality of Chinese language reference apps. I went into Android with eyes wide open in this regard, nothing is going to touch Pleco any time soon but a functional bi-directional Android dictionary would be quite handy for those not carrying an iPod around. Truthfully my N1 is often closer to hand than my crusty old WinMo phone relegated to running Pleco full-time, so I’m in the market for a quick ‘n dirty CEDICT reference.
There’s two cheap/free apps on the Android market place that I can see, the ad-supported Hanping and the $6.99 QuanWei. I gave them both a spin and only one stayed installed. Read on!
Hanping Chinese-English dictionary just like QuanWei, is a front end for the free CC-CEDICT source. That’s what you’d expect from any application which isn’t licensing something like Collins, ABC etc. That’s why these things can be free or beer-money sort of thing but it also means that the definitions are extremely terse, generally just word for word translations, and obviously there’s no example sentences or anything so useful as all that.
That said, every Chinese students needs a CC-CEDICT reference. It’s pretty awesome in terms of raw vocab and I find a lot of the time that it is the only reference that has contemporary words even when compared to an array of other dictionaries. I don’t even mean rare Internet savvy words, although it certainly has those, I mean actual words that you’d see on a sign or hear on the street. This collaborative dictionary is on the bleeding edge of modern Mandarin which makes it invaluable.
So that said, Hanping is the most transparent front end you can imagine. It’s a live list of search results from whatever you type. It’s smart enough to work out if you’re typing English, pinyin or hanzi and the terseness of CC-CEDICT is actually quite a help because what you see in the list is basically all there is, meaning the entire entries for half a dozen or so entries can be seen on the one page.
I can’t really fault the interface. It’s simple, it works exactly how you’d like it to. A nice place to click to clear the entry, no need to hit search etc. It’s easy-to-use, fast as hell and the font size and pinyin tone rendering is all spot on. It looks great on the Nexus One but it might be a little big on an older Android handset with a lower res screen.
And Hanping is free! There’s just a little AdMob banner on the bottom of the screen which is a small price to pay, even if it does seemingly want to convert me to Christianity all the time. What’s it trying to tell me?
So now for QuanWei. Looking good from the Marketplace, big score, nice screenshots. Essentially what we have a reasonably functional english, chinese (hanzi) and pinyin search engine again on the CC-CEDICT freely available database. Unfortunately you have to actually click on a button to switch between input modes. A shoddy UI has the text not even fitting in the buttons and annoyingly you have to hit return on the keyboard to activate searches. That gets old, fast.
There’s enough other minor annoyances like having to put a space in between pinyin syllables that really it just isn’t much fun to use. That said there’s a couple of features that Hanping doesn’t have. You can click on the hanzi in the search results and it writes it out in a big font vertically down the screen. I don’t really know why, the resolution of the original font seems easy enough to read but maybe someone wants that… Beyond that there’s also pronunciation of the entries which Hanping doesn’t have. I can’t really say more to this other than the fact it works. Personally I think if you’re at the stage where you need someone to read you a Chinese word for pronunciation (eg you cannot pronounce pinyin) then this is the wrong sort of application anyway.
You should almost certainly haul-ass to get hold of the Collin’s Beginner Chinese-English dictionary which is absolutely brilliant for elementry learners. It’s going to cost more money but having example sentences would much better. I personally don’t feel that Chinese pronunciation fits with the utility of a CC-CEDICT powered reference tool. A better differentiator, and one which would have made the app worth paying for, would be the ability to sketch hanzi. Neither of these dictionaries does that which means neither is going to be of any use if you don’t know how to pronounce a word.
So ultimately you can pay $6 and end up with a substantially less usable dictionary than Hanping? It’s a bit of a no-brainer really and for that reason the shortcut to Hanping sits on the front of my phone while I sadly refunded QuanWei. This doesn’t fill me with joy, there’s little enough action in this area that I’d like to see everyone taking the time to make a Chinese app come up with something that’s worth a few dollars. Unfortunately QuanWei in it’s current form simply isn’t.
So to be clear, big thumbs up for Hanping – go install! A rubber duck for QuanWei, here’s hoping you guys don’t give up hope and work out some other unique functionality.
Ideally I’d like to be able to do a round-up of the non CEDICT dictionaries such as SlovoEd and the products from Paragon etc but the reality is there’s no way I’m going to pay for any of them, and it feels a bit cheap to go and buy/refund just to review for the six people that read my blog 
At any rate my advice on proper electronic dictionaries is unlikely to change: If you don’t have an iPhone or a WinMo phone, buy an iPod and buy Pleco. Nothing else comes close and sadly, but understandably, Mike Love isn’t looking to bring Pleco to Android any time soon. Obviously if I see anything appear on the Android Marketplace that really does look like more than just a simple front end on the usual licensed dictionary content then I’ll blog about it quick as a flash.
Ah you know I hadn’t really thought of a generic handwriting IME for this purpose, it’s a damn good point. I kind of thought a dictionary input would be different from a regular IME – specifically thinking of the one in Pleco – but I don’t suppose it really needs to be.
Thanks for the link, I’ll check this out and poke around the ones on XDA dev too. Should be quite an interesting excersize.
On another note, the regular English IME from the brand new HTC Desire has been made available on good ol’ xda dev. I installed it and it’s pretty darn good, worth a look for Nexus One owners.
Great head-to-head!
There are a few handwriting options out there, most of which require rooting your phone (search xda-developers.com). However, I came across the Penpower Input Method:
http://uploadrobots.com/tQcZ62
which seems quite good, works on 1.6+ and does not require root. Unfortunately, I think its only traditional chars (though I could be wrong).
One great thing about Android is that an IME will work across all apps and so things like dictionaries don’t need to have any built-in IMEs. Therefore, I wouldn’t mark a dictionary down for not having an IME, rather mark the Market down instead.
When I entered a comment for QuanWei on the Marketplace, I had a bit of a keyboard failure and my comment finished early simply saying “Functional but terrible interface.” I meant to say a little mroe and be a little kinder, even though that’s pretty accurate I think.
Anyway, the authors delivered a pretty spirited defence (before reading this review) which was surprising and kind of rammed home how unhelpful and potentially hurtful comments like mine can be. Unfortunately I think my comment and conclusions above are still accurate and I like to think I’m not stubborn about such things, God knows Mike Love of Pleco fame has owned me on enough occasions
I had further discussion with the authors (efferential) and it’s clear they understand the UI design decisions they took (not auto-recognising input language and choosing to require spaces between every syllable) but fundamentally we still disagree on the approach.
They said: “QuanWei can be evaluated without cost for 24 hours and we encourage everyone to try out all the available dictionaries and decide for themselves–as you did–which one best fits their needs”.
Which seems like good advice and goes some way to alleviating the guilt I felt about refunding an application. Maybe I will go ahead and look at some of the commercial dictionaries too.
hi!
i use the Hanping dictionary..
i use the MOTO input method (to write in the Hanzi character) .. i like the dictionary (simple), but it only do simplified chinese, even if i enter the traditional character, it will display the character as a simplified character ..
thanks.
Hey Johannes. Have you tried pressing “Menu”? Then you can switch to Traditional chars.
Tell you what, I love the new widgets in Hanping! I had paid for some exceedingly rubbish app just to do something similar but this one is way better. Picking words from the whole dictionary is really great, already seen some interesting words come up.
You can post suggestions for Hanping here: http://embermitre.com/hanping/ce
Nifty. I gotta say I didn’t really use Hanping any more, so I like the widgets because it means I will actually get some use out of it. I carry an iPod around just for Pleco…
Hanping has improved quite a lot over the last month. Much better search results – in particular much more intelligent ordering.
I just released yet another Chinese Dictionary for Android.
It’s free and ad-free (forever).
The user interface is simple and I’ve integrated Word Lists and Flash Cards (similar to the Dian Hua app on iPhone), which have been instrumental in my own journey studying Chinese.
All feedback appreciated. Thank you.
Many thanks for this blog post. I still do not own a smartphone or a tablet, I don’t consider buying an iphone (I’m the “linux/open” kind of fellow) and my platform choice certainly will be driven by the availability of some excellent chinese/english software. I understand it’s still a little bit too early unfortunately …
I have to say Philippe, if Chinese software is your defining feature of a smartphone then I think you’d be better off with an iPhone. I wish it wasn’t true, but the fact of the matter is Pleco stands alone in terms of functionality for the serious student of Chinese.
CEDICT dictionaries are really just toys compared to the real thing.
Oh, there’s talk of bringing Pleco to Android but I have no idea when that will happen. The author doesn’t really like Android and I’ve given up arguing with him.
Hanping is good. I like the added touch of widgets. Great if you have lessons with a list of vocab to learn – like a poor man’s flashcards. The lookup is fast and simple, but I too would like character writing and radical lookup. I would pay 15 for those.
I recommend Google IME for Chinese input as very good. You can download it from the market.
There’s a character recogniser app that’s appeared on the marketplace later. It’s not a scratch on Pleco but it does work. Very nice to finally have that functionality on Android.
@Mat: what´s the name of the character recogniser app for android?
There are a few Chinese handwriting recogniser apps on the market. gPen and Hanwriting seem to be the most popular but I haven’t had time to try either out much.
Any preference?
It’s called Oepix, sorry for the delay. It’s called Hanzi recognizer. I think it’s a bit gash myself. You have to sketch something out and then hit recognise. I found it impossible, even by carefully writing, to get it to recognise 建 at all. Where I scrawled 藏 and it was fine.
I posted about handwriting apps just now, but in case anyone gets here through search – gPen is really worth a look handwriting wise. You sketch on top of a qwerty keyboard and I found the results surprisingly good. No English settings though and you will most likely need to increase the allowable delay between strokes before it auto recognises. Oh and turn the annoying tones off…
Thanks for the information. Me and my wife (she is chinese) tried some of the apps and she also had some problems with Hanzi recognizer, to recognize her writting. we also tried Hanping CE and it is really good.
I hope they will soon finish porting Pleco or a similar camera recognizer, which is offline usable. I tried the demo of one OCR-app for chinese characters (I think it was called chinese character camera recognizer), but it needs a active internet connection for tranlations.
I have both Hanping and Quanwei, but the real dealbreaker for me is that Penpower’s handwriting interface works with Hanping and doesn’t with Quanwei. (Oh, and Quanwei insists on giving you both full-form and simplified characters instead of the one you want – in my case, full-form.) The two annoying things about Penpower are that if you use its keyboard it always clicks – no way of turning the noise off – and that it doesn’t seem to have an apostrophe: it’s amazing how often you want to use it when you have to do without it.
@F I MacIllFhinnein Chinese handwriting recognition is now built-in to Hanping Chinese Dictionary Pro.