21 essential dictionaries and corpora for learning Chinese

Most learners of Chinese soon realise that available dictionaries have some serious problems. This is mostly true for Chinese-English (and English-Chinese) dictionaries, but it’s also true for Chinese-Chinese dictionaries (in short, they don’t work very well for learners). This article isn’t about the problem itself though, but how to overcome it. If you want to read about the issue, I suggest you head over to Albert Wolfe’s article about the shortcomings of CE dictionaries.

I have studied Chinese for some time now and have used a number of difference dictionaries. The bad news is that I still haven’t found a good dictionary that can do everything I want it to do, but the good news is that I have found several different dictionaries that among them can handle most of the questions I have.

In this article, I will share with you my favourite dictionaries, including why I think they are good, what I use them for and what drawbacks they (all) have. I also hope that you might give me suggestions of dictionaries that might replace those I list below. Note that I’m not looking for dictionaries that can do things that those below can already do well.

My goal here isn’t to give you a list of all available dictionaries. In fact, I have tried to keep the list as short as possible (it’s still quite long). This is because I know most learners are after simple and effective solutions. People who really want to explore other dictionaries will do that without my having to write about it.

This article about digital resources, so even if I mention offline dictionaries, they are still digital. I haven’t used enough paper dictionaries to evaluate them properly and most learners don’t bother with paper dictionaries today anyway.

I have sorted these sources into the following categories:

1. Online dictionaries mainly relying on English
2. Online dictionaries mainly relying on Chinese
3. Online dictionaries for traditional Chinese
4. Offline dictionaries you should check out
5. Online corpora and other sentence sources

Online dictionaries mainly relying on English

• MDBG
  What I use it for: This is my default dictionary in this category
  Pros: Clean interface, easy to use, handwriting recognition, stroke order, sound
  Cons: Sometimes inadequate English definitions (true for most dictionaries, though)
• Zhongwen.com
  What I use it for: Etymology, character components, horizontal character learning
  Pros: Click on any character part to view that component, good etymology in English
  Cons: Horrible interface, characters as pictures rather than text you can copy
• Arch Chinese
  What I use it for: Character components, collocations, word frequency
  Pros: Offers related characters and words sorted by frequency (this is awesome)
  Cons: None, really, this site is great in general
• HanziCraft
  What I use it for: Breaking down characters for sensible character learning
  Pros: Very easy to use, integrates well, very fast
  Cons: Is still quite new, I haven’t found too many problems though
• Yellow Bridge
  What I use it for: Same as above
  Pros: Reasonably quick look-up, all information in a tree structure
  Cons: Need to log in for full details (I don’t use that feature, though), much slower than HanziCraft
• Youdao
  What I use it for: Academic and/or specialist jargon, fixed expressions, dictionary
  Pros: Provides parallel translations, excellent for translation work
  Cons: None, really, this site is very useful

Online dictionaries mainly relying on Chinese

• Zdic
  What I use it for: This is my main Chinese-Chinese non-traditional dictionary
  Pros: Comprehensive, detailed definitions, English, very detailed single-character information
  Cons: None, really, this is my favourite online Chinese-Chinese dictionary
• Baidu Dictionary
  What I use it for: Idioms, fixed expressions, other things I can’t find in other dictionaries
  Pros: User-edited, so very comprehensive (think Wikipedia), usually easier than formal dictionaries
  Cons: User-edited, so quality varies, but usually very good

Online dictionaries mainly relying on Chinese (only traditional)

• Chinese spell checker
  What I use it for: Check the use of character variations in different words
  Pros: The above feature is unique as far as I know, incredibly useful
  Cons: None, really, this site fulfils its function pretty well
• Character variant dictionary
  What I use if tor: Sort out character variants (obviously)
  Pros: This site is indispensable for independent advanced learners
  Cons: It’s sometimes a bit confusing and doesn’t always give clear answers
• Taiwan Ministry of Education Chinese Dictionary
  What I use it for: Look up words I can’t find anywhere else, single character information
  Pros: Comprehensive and detailed
  Cons: Archaic examples, hard definitions, too detailed (this is not beginner-friendly at all)
• Taiwan Ministry of Education Elementary School Dictionary
  What I use it for: Single-character definitions and collocations in Chinese
  Pros: Easier to understand than its bigger cousin (see above)
  Cons: Only has single-characters
• Taiwan Ministry of Education Character Stroke Order Dictionary
  What I use it for: Check stroke order, check the current writing standard in Taiwan
  Pros: Detailed, well-structured, comprehensive
  Cons: None, really, it does the job pretty well

Offline dictionaries you should check out (apps)

• Pleco
  What I use it for:Everything on the move, this is all you need, really
  Pros: Excellent handwriting input, OCR input, flashcards, excellent dictionaries
  Cons: Some functions aren’t free
• Hanping
  What I use it for: Very similar to Pleco in terms of functionality
  Pros: Cheaper than Pleco
  Cons: Still costs money, fewer features than Pleco

Online corpora and other sentence sources

• Jukuu
  What I use it for: Sentence mining, gathering large volumes of examples
  Pros: Contains a large number of sentences
  Cons: Sometimes hard to find actual sentences, some results are either only words or fragments
• Iciba
  What I use it for: Similar to Jukuu above
  Pros: Contains a large number of sentences
  Cons: The English translations are horrible, don’t trust them more than you would trust Google translate.
• Nciku
  What I use it for: Same as above; has fewer but in general better sentences
  Pros: Higher quality sentences with much better translations (reliable English in many cases)
  Cons: Lacks examples of uncommon words and sometimes have too few sentences to find the usage I’m after
• LCMC
  What I use it for: Collocations, mostly
  Pros: Is a real, tokenised corpus, very big
  Cons: Hard to use if you’re not used to corpus research
• Academia Sinica Balanced Corpus of Modern Chinese
  What I use it for: Most queries about traditional Chinese or Mandarin usage in Taiwan
  Pros: Is a real, tokenised corpus
  Cons: Only covers Taiwan, not big enough at times
• Google
  What I use it for: Anything I can’t find using the other sources I’ve listed above
  Pros: Mindbogglingly high number of sentences
  Cons: Hard to find what you’re looking for, hard to be sure that what you find is actually a good example

That’s all for now, I think. If you have any suggestions for how to improve this list by replacing any dictionary with one which is strictly better, let me know! Remember, though, this isn’t an attempt to gather as many dictionaries as possible, but rather to list the best dictionaries for specific purposes. I will keep the list updated as I find better alternatives, please help!

Update: I removed Wenlin and added Hanping instead. Wenlin is great, but it’s very outdated and I can’t even use it with what I have available, whereas Hanping is much more likely to help students. I also removed I Cha Cha and added Youdao instead. The latter is roughly a hundred times better than the previous and I blame my previous inclusion of I Cha Cha on plain ignorance.