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Tutorial 5: Looking Up Words and Phrases
The following tutorial applies only to Chinese Toolbox FREE. In Chinese Toolbox READER the MDBG dictionary is integrated with the program. It automatically looks up both character and word definitions as you come across them in the reader and includes a host of other features for studying Chinese.
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To look up words and phrases in Chinese Toolbox FREE, you need to use a third-party program or website. In this tutorial, I use the MDBG Online Chinese-English dictionary website. The dictionary for the MDBG website is actually the CC-CEDICT dictionary, the same dictionary already incorporated into Chinese Toolbox READER.
Launch Chinese Toolbox FREE and a web browser. In this tutorial I’ll be using only the CTF main window and the reading window. I’ve placed the browser (Firefox) to the right. The reading text (intermediate level, #10) in this example comes from the Chinese Reading World of the University of Virginia.
As with all the tutorials, clicking on the screen shots will display the full-size image in your browser.
For this example, I recognize most of the characters in the document (lower left in the screen shot above). However, I’m not familiar with the first three characters. Chinese Toolbox FREE makes it easy to look up the individual character definitions, but what I want to know is the meaning of the title of this document.
I suspect the first two characters of this title comprise a word, so I’m going to look them up as single word. The first character already appears as the main entry in the dictionary window.
Step 1: Click on the large character frame at the top right of the dictionary window. You’ll notice that a dotted line, the selection box, appears around the character frame after you click on it. The main character frame containing the character 絕 is shown surrounded by a selection box in the screen shot below:
Step 2: Press Ctrl-c to copy the character 絕 to the Windows clipboard.
Step 3: Click in the search field of the MDBG dictionary web page and press Ctrl-v to paste the character that we copied in the previous step. You should see the following:
Repeat the previous three steps for the second character of the title. You’ll end up with the following:
As soon as you paste the second character, the MDBG website begins looking up these two characters in its dictionary. After only a second or two, the one phrase in the dictionary that contains these two characters is presented in a drop-down box just below the search field as follows:
You can click on the entry in the drop-down box to display the full entry in the dictionary web page. If you do nothing, the drop-down box will disappear after a few seconds.
After clicking on the drop-box entry, the selected dictionary entry appears:
Note: Be sure that before you press Ctrl-c in Chinese Toolbox FREE, you first select the large Chinese character in the dictionary window. If you click on the character in the reader window then press Ctrl-c, you’ll copy ALL of the reader text to the Windows clipboard. If you’re looking up word definitions, that’s not what you want.