#language learning recommendation

My favorite Mandarin dictionaries:

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MDBG

I’m not even gonna try listing all of the features because there’s just so many and I’ve used it for many years now and on a daily basis. Not to mention it is constantly updated. In terms of features and overall quality, MDBG is the best in my opinion.

MandarinSpot’s Annotator

Sometimes has slightly different definitions compared to MDBG, and sometimes it will have the definition for words that MDBG does not have entered yet. Also, it’s helpful for anyone who reads Chinese best horizontally as opposed to listed vertically like on MDBG.

Pleco (app)

Most similar to MDBG, but for your smart phone.

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Important Note:

Please keep in mind that none of these dictionaries are perfect and language is constantly evolving, so new terms are not likely to be in any of these dictionaries. there is not many moderators for these dictionaries so sometimes definitions and words won’t be entered in for weeks or even months.

If you find yourself with some thing that is clearly a word but does not have an English definition entered into either of these dictionaries it works best to look up the definition in Chinese on Baidu Dict or Google, or even check out Wikitionary/Wikipedia. 

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This is something I only realized I could use more recently and I haven't seen someone mention it so I thought I should; Wikipedia can be a great resource to learn specific vocabulary and can be really helpful if you are pursuing a translation specialty like medicine or politics as Wikipedia has endless amounts of articles about those topics. (Sometimes Wikitionary will also have definitions for things you are looking for as well)

We all know that Wikipedia is full of information in English but has thousands of articles in other languages as well. On English articles all you have to do to change the language is select the language button at the top right of the screen and select another language. However, not every wikipedia article is translated from English, and some articles exist without an English translation. Also, even though there are many translated articles, many will not be an exact 1:1 translation and can be missing a lot of information but it is a very good tool when wanting to learn the meaning of words that might not be in an online dictionary.

For example: Here is the article "First Secretary of State" in English:

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In the top right corner you can see a tab that says "15 languages", this clearly means that there are 15 different languages to choose from that the article is translated into.

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Now, if you click this button and select Chinese, the page will look like the picture below. Now you may deduce that the correct word for "First Secretary of State" in Mandarin would be "首席大臣" and it also states the English version of the word in the Mandarin article in this instance which further confirms the meaning. However, some articles may be missing this function.

Also, if you find an article in Chinese or another language first, the language tab is on the bottom left corner instead of the top right.

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To learn how to pronounce Mandarin words you find (that aren't already in online dictionaries) you can use websites like MDBG or Chinese Converter that will show you individual pronunciations for characters. Even Google Translate is quite reliable for pinyin but in Chinese Converter and Google Translate sometimes they do not pick up characters with multiple pronunciations correctly or ignore tone change rules.

For Japanese you can use websites like Nihongo Dera's Kana Converter or Jisho to figure out pronunciations.

I could make a whole post in itself for how to figure out pronunciations for words in languages you don't natively speak so I'll stop here.

I hope this post helps someone!