What's New
An update to recent changes on this site.
2022-06-01:
Improved reverse lookup for English to Chinese and lookup from pinyin.
2022-05-14:
Improved performance by compressing larger and most commonly used files
and caching then at edge locations closer to users' geographic
locations using a CDN. This reduces page load times.
2021-05-20:
The
Chinese Notes Chinese-English Dictionary Chrome Extension is
now available. The extension adds a context menu when text on a web page
is selected so that term can be used to lookup and entry in the Chinese
dictionary. You can lookup terms with simplified or traditional Chinese
or pinyin, or reverse lookup with an English equivalent. See
extension support page for more
details.
2021-01-28:
New guide published on Youtube with demo of new features
Translating from Chinese with the NTI Reader (January 2021
edition). Thes new features include
- Quotation database: Find quotations in the reader and aligning with published English translations
- Organization of the dictionary - named Buddhist entities (people, places, text titles, etc) now excluded from Chinese Notes to avoid confusion. Visit ntireader.org or hbreader.com if you need these. Some may be still found but I am working to separate them so that they can be managed separately.
- Improved word definitions and coverage.
2020-09-05:
Moved the compute platform to Cloud Run. This will provide a more reliable backend to power
the web site.
2020-08-04:
Added new Translation Memory
feture to enable discovery of phrases and names that are close but not
exact matches.
2020-05-29:
A large update to vocabulary, now with a total of over 140,000 entries
and over 1,300 named entities separately in the
data/named_modern_entities.txt file.
Most of the new vocabulary is from CC-CEDICT with some cross checking
in various sources.
Also added the 千字文 Thousand Character Classic.
2020-04-10:
A large update to vocabulary, now with a total of over 110,000 entries
and over 700 named entities separately in the
data/named_modern_entities.txt file.
2020-04-03:
A large update to vocabulary, now with a total of over 100,000 entries.
2020-02-10:
A new text tokenizer was introduced that scans both left to right and
right to left then compares the two. The scan with the least number of terms
will be selected. The tokenization method used is similar in principle
to previously. It is a greedy method that scans a chunk of text
using the dictionary to tokenize text selecting the set of tokens that
gives the least number of tokens. Since it is greedy, it is not always
optimal. Previously, this was done with only left to right scanning.
The change introduced right to left scanning in addition. The left to
right scan is compared to the right to left scan and the one with the
least number of tokens wins. This rarely happens but it can be confusing
for readers when it does. For example, consider the phrase
武裝的士兵 an armored soldier
The left to right tokenizer will select
武裝、的士、兵
The right left tokenizer will select
武裝、的、士兵
The right to left tokenizer is correct but it takes a human to figure
that out. In this case the number of tokens is the same and the left
will be returned, so the result is ambiguous. This is part of an ongoing
effort to improve the accuracy of the tokenizer. More work is required
to help users in ambiguous cases like this.
The vocabulary has been updated with new words, corrections, and references. Please let me know if you see any problems by emailing alex@chinesenotes.com.
2020-01-04: Added contained in with translation to headword pages.
2019-12-25: Added term splitting. Updated vocabulary.
2019-08-18: Added text Dream of the Red Chamber 紅樓夢. Updated vocabulary.
2019-08-10: Added page to Search for Chinese idioms. Updated vocabulary.
2019-07-07: Changed result presentation on the main page from tabular to list form for multi-word expressions.
2019-06-22: Changed user interface to Material Design Web, migrating from the previously used Material Design Lite, to be more mobile friendly. Vocabulary update. Added https.
2019-06-09: The Chinese Notes Chinese-English dictionary now contains over 2,000 idioms. Fixed a problem with the word frequency analysis for the corpus: analysis/corpus_analysis.html The summary word frequency analysis was broken for some time and is now restored. Updated the vocabulary for the embedded Chinese-English dictionary. New number of headwords is 90,300.
2018-09-03: Added highlighted snippets to full text search.
2018-08-11: Added a new feature to search text in document bodies within a specific collection.
2018-07-31: Added a new feature to search text in document bodies. Status is experimental for a period of testing.
2018-07-12: Added a large number of texts to build out a digital library for classical and historic texts including the thirteen classics, twenty four histories, collections of poetry, and other texts, totalling over 39 million characters. See Texts for details.
2018-04-2: Did a major overhaul to the user interface, using Material Design. Besides the nicer look and feel, it includes dialogs for each Chinese word in texts as well as mouse over. This is much easier to look up word details than links to word definitions because it allows you to better keep your place when reading a text and is much more mobile friendly. Also, added new texts for The Book of Songs 《詩經》, The Classic of Tea 《茶經》, and Book of Documents 《尚書》.
2016-01-04: Changed word detail page to combine all senses in a single HTML page.
2015-12-23: Added many texts to the text collection, including The Analects of Confucius 《論語》, The Book of Rites 《禮記》, Zhuangzi 《莊子》, Records of the Grand Historian 《史記》, Shuo Wen Jie Zi 《說文解字》, and Commentaries on the Four Books by Zhu Xi 朱熹《四書章句集注》.
2015-09-25: Added Er Ya 《爾雅》, an early Chinese dictionary.
2015-09-07: Menu reorganization. Added Texts menu, merged Classics under Texts and Reference, merged Culture under Reference. Updated the Introduction to Literary Chinese pages.
2015-09-07: Started maintaining this page.