>Tom,
>I used the method where I first open the file in Wenlin, and then choose Import on the menu. Is there another method?

No, that’s the right way.

>The file I generated for Wenlin was 28 MB, and Wenlin was not too happy even opening it in the editor (although I must say it performed much better than expected on files of several MB, that some text editors choke on).

You mean it took a long time? That’s not surprising, but it shouldn’t make the program unhappy. The ABC cidian, as a text file, is 29 megabytes. On my 2-year-old MacBook (2 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo, 1 GB RAM), Wenlin opens it in six seconds, and imports it in six minutes. Did you actually encounter an error or crash during the import, or did you just run out of patience? There should be a progress bar showing the percentage of completion. I encourage you to try again and let it run overnight, or use a faster computer. If there’s a real problem, I really want to know about it.

> I am very excited to hear that you are working hard on the next version. It would be fun to hear more about what kind of features, etc, are planned, and perhaps you could receive some user feedback on what is most needed etc.

Frankly, what’s most needed is money! But our plan is to make ABC web-based, publish the Wenlin source code, obtain not-for-profit status, and encourage a lot of experts to volunteer.

We don’t really need a lot of feedback currently, since our to-do list is already ten miles long. Nevertheless, we always welcome suggestions. The main things we’re already working on are a completely new English-Chinese dictionary; user-interface improvements (e.g. multiple independent windows); and flashcards that aren’t limited to monosyllables.

Thanks for your encouragement! All the best,

Tom (wenlin.com)

I am very excited to hear that you are working hard on the next version. It would be fun to hear more about what kind of features, etc, are planned, and perhaps you could receive some user feedback on what is most needed etc.

Thanks
Stian

I have imported CEDICT into Wenlin witout problems.

Stian: “Wenlin required [the pinyin for each entry], and it even checked to see that each pinyin was a possible reading for the given Chinese character.”

If you put .-nopy on a line by itself before the first entry, the pinyin validity check will be skipped.

e.g. the following entries will be accepted:

cidian
.-nopy
***
py blah
char 一
1df one; 1; single; a (article); as soon as; entire; whole; all; throughout
ser 42
***
py blah
char 一一
1df one by one; one after another
ser 43
***

Ok, this site is still excellent in many ways, but before using it I overestimated the amount of bindings. It only works off of titles (useful, no doubt), not quite sure I thought there would be anything else.

So, someone mentioned this (maybe you as well), but we’ve just been manually doing this. And for words that aren’t in titles you pray for quality translations so you can match up sentence by sentence.

Nonetheless, as they say in Xi’an when the food is great (‘unrepresentable in english’).

Two things needed:

1. pinyin, (correct pinyin), perhaps impossible, perhaps only with users gradually updating it can this problem be fixed.

2. in sentence usage. If the paired word could include a link to this wikipedia page or even just the sentence in which it appears, that would of great use for so many reasons.

Mind telling me what those great chinese dictionaries are? I’ve been here 5 years and have yet to find them, learners, chin-chin, chin-eng, etc. English-chinese certainly have quite a few good ones.

More later.