Reviews for Pleco Chinese Dictionary

Excellent in many ways, but…. I bought the flashcard add-on recently, and still haven’t been able to figure it out, in spite of hours deep diving into the very, very, very long instructions. Nothing intuitive about the menus, most of the names for every options are impenetrably obscure, the decision trees seem hopelessly absurd, etc […]

Absolutely amazing. Every word is read slowly by Chinese speakers. For the majority of words there are example sentences which can be read out in an artificial voice. you can type in with Pinyin or draw the character. Has both simplified and traditional

Brilliant dictionary and translator. The stroke order was the selling point for me, but the ability to translate from pinying to characters and vice versa is excellent. (from an absolute beginner

The new OCR algorithm is absolutely amazing! it can now read slanted text, badly readable text and all kind of different types of text on the same screen! it’s super useful when reading memes on 小红书 to lean chinese! you do need to enable the experimental ocr feature in the settings though, as it’s much […]

this app already marvelous, but there is one or two that can be improve 1. OCR is sucks sometimes, and for snap OCR, you guys should make the option to snap it horizontally or vertically, i mean sometimes chinese book is writing top down, not left to right, dev should consider this. 2. Flashcard, is […]

The app is very easy to use and is a great resource for one learning Chinese. The multiple dictionaries including sample sentences, words usage as verbs or nouns etc; functions like the clip reader etc are really helpful. Thank you Pleco!

I’ve been a Pleco user for more than a decade. The updated OCR is different, and after using it for a few weeks I can confidently say it’s worse than before. Just the basic job of recognizing characters, it’s gone from near 100% to barely usable.

I regret paying any money for this. This app 100% needs to be sunsetted and replaced. The manual doesn’t match the app, OCR can’t read top-bottom and honestly can barely read a lot of single characters correctly, the flashcard system is a waste of time (just use anki), I can go on.

More than just a simple dictionary. Provides card system to review words and even lookup words on screen. The app is free with no ads with some add-ons costing money but they are completely optional. This app is a must if you’re learning Chinese.

I would absolutely love to give this app 5 stars. It is hands down the best chinese to english dictionary app. However, there is one problem with the app. The problem: When attempting to speak into the app, it often correctly displays the spoken words, but if it picks up any noise whatsoever it will […]

The best Chinese dictionary app. Just needs multiple speed options for displaying even slower strokes (writing) for the Chinese character than what is currently available. I realize this is not necessary as you can manually do it with the skip button, but it could be helpful. Please also add a quick link jump from theMandarin/Chinese […]

9/29/23 (New): Still an incredible app. This is THE chinese dictionary app to have if you are looking for the ONE to have that has everything. 11/2/22 (Old): Incredible app. Absolutely worth every add on purchase you make. It has a lot of content and very specific details to each character/ word. Tabs for sentences, […]

Edit: I must not have looked at the settings very closely— Pleco interfaces with the AnkiDroid API. I don’t know when this feature was added or if it’s been there all along, but I’m happy to know it’s there. I’ve been using Pleco for years and have always been impressed by the company’s attitude towards […]

I don’t write a ton of reviews but I just had to for this one. This is quite possibly one of the best-designed and useful apps ever and life-changing. If they had the equivalent for other languages they’d drive Duolingo right out of business. This is invaluable as a learning tool, with graded readers fully […]

This is one of the most well-made apps on the planet. It recognizes Chinese handwriting from my left thumb, and I’m a right handed first-year Chinese student. It has definitions and examples for everything. It has pronunciation for everything. It does OCR. The free version is probably good enough for anyone living who isn’t living […]

I have used this app for years (since 2012/13). I love the voice to text recognition in Chinese (Cantonese). It has flashcards and categories to help you study and organize words. It also can show you stroke order of each character. Definitely best Chinese dictionary and learning app for me. Since I started using it, […]

Best app for Chinese learning. Every learner needs this app. It breaks down words to the individual characters, and the characters into the individual radicals. This makes it so much easier to remember new words and characters. I also like the smorgasbord of other features, like the fact they sell you graded readers through the […]

This is one of the best-designed, most smoothly-performing apps of any kind that I’ve ever used. A fast and amazingly powerful Chinese dictionary app that lets you search and browse words and characters in every way you could imagine. The free version is optimized for searching Chinese-to-English definitions, not so great if you need to […]

This is such a great dictionary. Especially the feature that allows you to draw the character. After you use it for a while and if you find that you like it, I recommend springing for the Basic Bundle, which gives you stroke order for all characters, not just some, plus better pronunciation audios, plus the […]

Pleco is alone in its class for excellence and they offer many add-on features, dictionaries, and it has a good flash card system. I highly recommend it. That being said, often I find some compound words/phrases missing, but Google Translate can fill in those gaps easily. It would be nice to be able to recommend […]