Babelcarp add-on for Pleco

If you have the Pleco Chinese dictionary app for either iOS or Android, you can get the Babelcarp add-on for Pleco by contacting me.

But before you email me, please read the following to learn exactly what you’ll be getting and what you’ll need to do in order to get it to work.

Pros and Cons

There are three main advantages the Pleco add-on version of Babelcarp has over the web app, and honestly I mainly use the app myself now:

It’s way faster than querying the Babelcarp mothership via the Net.
It works offline.
If your understanding of Chinese grammar is reasonably good and your vocabulary is large enough that you wouldn’t have to look up virtually every word in, say, a Chinese web page, you will find you can productively read Chinese tea texts by importing them into Pleco’s File Manager and reading them there, tapping on words and phrases you don’t know, and the tea terms will be defined by Babelcarp.

But there is one big disadvantage: The Babelcarp Pleco add-on is static. I’ll send it to you, but then it sits inside your Pleco app, unchanging. Meanwhile, the database behind the Babelcarp web app is getting updated, added to.

In order to be able to use the add-on, you need a bit more than the vanilla version of Pleco you get gratis when you first install the app. You’ll need the Flashcard System add-on, which isn’t very much money. If you want to use the Babelcarp add-on to tap on words in text to pop up definitions, you’ll also want the Document Reader add-on.

How to install

To install the Babelcarp Pleco add-on, within the Pleco app go to Settings→DICTIONARY SEARCH→Manage Dictionaries. Tap “Add User” on the bottom right. From the popup that then arises, tap “Load Existing” and select the file you got from me.

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Page last modified Jan 10 2016