karanmisra.com/qingwen

Qingwen is a Chinese dictionary that will finally make it easy for you to lookup words in Chinese.

Search

It takes advantage of the most powerful feature on the iPhone for Chinese students and native speakers, which is its ability to do excellent handwriting recognition, using which you can search for any character you come across! Not only that, you can also search by typing in the Pinyin (with or without tones) or the English meaning of the word. And it’s fast!

Also, knowing the fact that you want to see the search results as soon as they’re found, the search results contain a brief summary of each dictionary entry found, and the search results are arranged by the frequency of the term in Modern Chinese.

Detailed

If you do decide that the brief description in the search results isn’t enough for you and want to get more details on a word, Qingwen doesn’t disappoint. The detailed view for each character lets you look it up in the dictionary in many different ways, such as looking for that character in other words and finding characters which sound similar to it.

Word Lists

I know that when I read something in Chinese, I stumble upon new words every now and then, which I want to look up right then and there, but also keep around for a while so that I can run through them after a while and refresh my memory. And if you’re anything like me, you’re going to love Qingwen, which lets you save any words you dig up into any number of word lists. I personally prefer to store words according to where I found them. So, I have, for example, a word list for all the words I found while reading Hālì Bōtè and a different ones for ones I found by reading the news or watching a TV show. You can also export your word lists using email by tapping on the Export button next to each word list.

Active Development

I am probably the most frequent user and biggest critic of Qingwen, so if you think something is not quite right, you can bet that I’ve already found the problem and am working on fixing it. And if you don’t think that’s the case you can always drop me a line. I welcome both bugs that you might find and also suggestions for features I should be adding. Be as nitpicky as you like!

Thanks for checking out Qingwen!

Karan

Say it!

If you’re new to learning Chinese, you will appreciate the fact that Qingwen can read aloud any word when you tap on the speaker icon next to the word. You can ask Qingwen to read words aloud in either Mandarin or Cantonese, whichever one you prefer. (Internet connection required.)