Mandarin Course

This example clearly shows how MDBG Chinese Reader is far superior to the FireFox plug-in “Chinese Pera-kun”. This example shows the “highlighting” feature of Chinese Reader, making it much easier to follow whole sentences. Also because Chinese Reader has multiple translations for a character, unlick Pera-kun, you can read almost any sentence with ease. One character in this particular example that Pera-kun fails on is 与. This character has 3 pronunciations and 3 meanings according to the MDBG dictionary: yǔ “together with”, yù “take part in”, and yú “a particle expressing doubt or surprise”. Whereas, in the Pera-kun dictionary it has only one: yú, which in this context is incorrect and meaningless, making the sentence difficult to read. This ability to see multiple meanings of the same character, not to mention the excellent dictionary that it sources from, pushes the MDBG Chinese Reader out in front of Pera-kun by a long way. Add to this the ability to not rely on the FireFox browser, meaning you can read Chinese characters in any application, makes it a winner application for those studying Chinese. Perhaps the only thing that lets it down is a bit of sluggishness and odd glitches at times. For the most part I can leave it running in the background without any problems but now and then I will notice some sluggishness in the mouse pointer or weird stuff with copying and pasting (even non-Chinese text). However, with a single click of the system tray icon the reader is …
Video Rating: 5 / 5