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[Review] Chinese Reader for Mac OSX (Beta 0.3.1)

I came across Chinese Reader for Mac OSX over at the forums on Skritter. This is a very promising application, and while it is only in beta, it still feels quite polished and enjoyable to use. I love the connectivity with Skritter, where you can directly add vocabulary as well as import known vocabulary. Great way to review while reading any kind of texts. It automatically highlights words that aren’t in your dictionary, which makes it easier to pick out what you don’t know (and see what you know!) and add it to your dictionary if you know it, or to Skritter to practice it.

Nice clean interface makes reading easy too.

As you can see, it also provides a pop-up dictionary, which is based on the latest version of the CC-CEDICT. In addition, you can add vocabulary from other sources as well. It supports both traditional and simplified, thankfully, so you can add input in from a variety of sources. There’s also a “book”-like interface which is quite nifty, too (this may also be a good time to think back to Haodoo and import those Harry Potter books!).

Take a moment to enjoy the classics–such as this Yahoo! news article.

Anyway, the developer seems really open to any ideas you may have about it, as well as any questions, which makes this project all the more fun to watch as it develops.

This is also a great way to recall back to my “reading as an SRS” method that I briefly touched upon in this post:

The text, then, acts like an SRS system for itself. That is, the text, as you read, will automatically reinforce the words that you’ve already looked up at the start. As long as you have a good idea of what they mean, you’ll see a wide range of uses for it in context.

It’s worth taking a look into, and if you do, let me know what you think as well!

 

6 thoughts on “[Review] Chinese Reader for Mac OSX (Beta 0.3.1)”

  1. Thanks for the review! And, a bigger thanks for one of your other posts on the Hitchhikers Guide in Chinese, which has now rocketed to first on my reading list :).

    Byzanti

    1. More thanks to you for putting that program together! It’s really quite handy, I’m quite enjoying using it 🙂 Also, glad you liked the HHG link. Now with this program I can really appreciate it even more 😀

  2. Check out my online Chinese reader for an online alternative. It’s pretty fully featured. It lets you add Chinese texts or just urls. It even has a bookmarklet to let you save pages (similar to instapaper). It even lets you choose your font, choose your dictionary lookup style (popovers or a bar like wenlin).

    And it has an “I know it” button, too!

    Would love to hear your comments.

    1. I’ll take a look at it! Thanks for sharing!

      I honestly love all the new little start-ups to learn Chinese, and with a brief look it seems you’ve got something really great going, too. Looking forward to trying it out!

  3. This app is really great. Unfortunately, I’m Vietnamese, so I need the definition in Vietnamese (Vietnamese is from Chinese so it is much easier to understand if the definition is Vietnamese). I have a Chinese-Vietnamese in the Dictionary app, can you help me to use it instead. Thanks a lot.

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