Placo (Dictionary)
✅繁體 ✅简体
Pleco is the most extensive Chinese dictionary app, with features like handwriting recognition, flashcards, and text translation. Basically free, but if you want to use those extension functions, then you need to pay a little bit.
How to use Placo
Download and open it!
Functions
On the right side up that blue C is for switching Chinese and English searching.
Pleco offers 4 different ways to search words: Radical, handwriting, voice, and keyboard.
After you search for a word, it shows both simplified and traditional characters. You can set which one you want to be your priority in the setting.
The colors of the character are related to the tones, and you can also set the colors by yourself.
With a further tap, you can view its components, stroke order, and sample sentences, but not every word.
If you pay some money, you can unlock many extra functions.
Among all the functions, the flashcard is the most popular one. If the material you are using now is a common material, you probably don’t even need to make flashcards by yourself, you can just download it in this app.
Pleco also has audio narration, but very robotic. If you are an Android owner, you can pay to use the Screen Reader/OCR (Optical Character Reader) as an overlay over other apps or web browsers to optically recognize Chinese characters displayed on your device.
Anyway, all my students are using Pleco, and to be honest, I haven’t seen any Chinese learners who do not have Pleco on their phones. So if you haven’t used it, you should give it a try!
Oh! I just want to mention one thing. Pleco is an almost error-free app, but sometimes it shows the rarely used words in front of the commonly used words. Umm…so don’t use Pleco to argue with YOUR CHINESE TEACHER!
