kindle paperwhite has many built-in dictionaries. for a learner of both English and Chinese language, you may want to make full use of this feature. if you have a kindle running in English (US) as your default language like me, your should have no difficulty locating the “Modern Chinese-English Dictionary”. This dictionary is hardly enough for a keen learner, for e.g. it doesn’t even have the pronunciation (hanyu pinyin) of the words!
Sometime having access to a full Chinese-Chinese dictionary is useful. To get this, you will need to do a ‘workaround’. The option for 现代汉语词典 (Xian Dai Han Yu Ci Dian) appears in my case after I:
1. set the language of my kindle to 简体中文
2. reboot into 简体中文 interface (with internet connection enabled)
3. go to ‘default dictionary for each language and you should now see 现代汉语词典 under the Chinese section.
4. select 现代汉语词典 as default dictionary
5. set the language of my kindle back to English (US)
6. reboot back to English (US) interface
and you should now have access to BOTH 现代汉语词典 and Modern Chinese-English Dictionary (:
a photo of my kindle with English interface with 现代汉语词典 activated:
[update 27/7]
i may have found a FASTER and easier way to install the dictionaries.
1. logon to your amazon account
2. go to “Manage your content and devices”
3. click on Show –> Dictionaries and User Guides
4. select the dictionary you want, and “Deliver” it to your kindle
5. enjoy (:
Hello,
Is there a dictionary that defines Chinese words in English? I am a native English speaker and would like to download Chinese books to read, but as I come across characters/words I don’t know, I want to find out their definitions.
Cheers!
Hello Sophia,
Thanks for the question. Yes, a Chinese-English dictionary (现代汉英词典) is available too. Check out the list of available dictionaries as seen in my Kindle:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/ttrqeymz09mix52/2015-01-25%20List%20of%20dictionaries%20in%20Kindle.jpg?dl=0
Have a great time reading. Cheers!
Several of your readers have asked about Chinese-English dictionaries for Kindle. I hope the following information might be useful to them.
The newly-published LXM Chinese-English Pinyin Dictionary for Kindle is based on the CC-CEDICT database and provides English definitions and hanyu pinyin for about 115,000 headwords. It is designed for use on the Kindle Paperwhite and Kindle Voyager ebook readers. While reading a Chinese text, the reader selects the characters to look up and the dictionary entry pops up. Each headword is shown in traditional and simplified characters. Separate versions are available for lookup in traditional- or simplified-character ebooks. See https://www.amazon.com/Traditional-Character-Chinese-English-Pinyin-Dictionary-Kindle-ebook/dp/B01MT2DPP0 and https://www.amazon.com/Simplified-Character-Chinese-English-Pinyin-Dictionary-Kindle-ebook/dp/B01NCPG52W for details.
David Givens
thanks David. appreciate very much for the sharing of insights. cheers 😉
It’s so hard to select words on Kindle though
I agree! It takes a bit of getting used to while interacting with an old-school LCD panel, vs. the latest LED IPS touchscreens that we are seeing everyday on the new smartphones (:
I’m studying old (pre-Han) Chinese texts, and really need a Chinese-English dictionary in traditional characters. I just looked at Amazon’s current list of dictionaries, and find only the ones you show—using simplified characters.
I’ve installed the file cc-cedict.prc as described at http://www.skritter.com/forum/topic?id=313679198, and my Kindle settings no show it as the active dictionary for Chinese—but no result is returned when I highlight a character. (For example, 不: No Definition Found)
Apart from that, my Kindle often obstinately insists on selecting two characters instead of one—very commonly characters that don’t combine to make a word.
Any help you can give will be enormously appreciated
hello David! thanks for dropping by. i’m so sorry but i don’t think i could offer any help in this area. i did a quick google, and noticed that what you mentioned is a common problem. perhaps if we could catch the attention of #amazon, they could do something on their end, and all of us could benefit from it. hope you could find a solution soon. all the best for your studies (:
Thanks for that, TY! (Or is T for your surname? Not sure how to greet you.)
It turns out the dictionary I complained about works fine with *some* texts: specifically, the Diamond Sutra from ctext.org, copied & pasted into MS Word, then emailed to my Kindle with the subject line “Convert” I suspect my other documents didn’t use UTF-8 encoding, but that’s a hunch I need to check. I will, and will report back.
Better yet the selection problem goes away! You can select half of 東西, an isolated question mark, anything. A wild guess is that the selection problem when using the Kindle Store dictionaries you refer to comes from sloppy indexing.
As for catching the attention of #Amazon, I’ve given up getting the attention of any of the tech giants, except occasionally Google on some aspects of their web apps. Can Jeff Bezos not know that China has more Internet users than any other country? More literate people? An enorrmous, highly-skilled and underpaid labor force? Maybe he choked on his chow mien as a kid.
Thanks again for providing this excellent forum.
hi David! yes, T in front, as in all Chinese names, is my surname Tan（陳/陈）; YH is my name (:
looks like you have resolved the issue **great**
so, the lesson here for all of us is to take note of our document’s encoding; doing a proper UTF-8 unicode encoding would allow the in-built dictionary to function properly. thanks for returning to share the info with all of us 😉
Cheers, and happy reading!
Hello,
I am guessing that I could click on an English word and get a Chinese translation(dictionary)? for people who are learning English… 🙂
yes, just choose an English-Chinese Dictionary will do (: