nciku Team Blog

[Update: The maintenance is going well, and most functions of the site - including the dictionary, mobile dictionary and handwriting features - are already back online. If you still see the maintenance notice, force-refresh the site by holding down control and pressing F5. Some areas of the site, including the Q&A, are still not available.]

Due to essential maintenance, the nciku website will be unavailable for several days starting from Saturday March 31st. We hope to finish this maintenance before Monday April 2nd, but it is possible that this downtime might last until Friday April 6th.

All features of all nciku sites (including nciku.com, m.nciku.com, nciku.cn, nciku.tw and nciku.jp) will be unavailable during this period, including services and mobile apps which depend on our website. In particular, in addition to our website, the following services will not be available:

• nciku Tooltip Dictionary browser extension (Internet Explorer, Firefox and Chrome)
• nciku Online Dictionary mobile app (iPhone and Android)
• Handwriting Tool and Audio Sound on the full version of our nciku Chinese Dictionary app (iPhone/iPad and Android)

We are sorry for the inconvenience.

Edit: The maintenance will start Saturday March 31st, not on Friday March 30th as previously stated.

Do you use Google Chrome? Did you wish there was a quicker way to look up the meaning of Chinese words from within your web browser? If so, you might be interested in our new “nciku Chinese Handwriting & Tooltip Dictionary” Chrome extension.

This extension adds an nciku handwriting button to your browser, letting you use our handwriting recognition tool without leaving the website you’re on. What’s more, you can choose to see quick translations from nciku.com every time you select Chinese text with your mouse, or even when you hover over the words you want to look up. Tooltip translations include pinyin, definitions and audio recordings, and also link back to the full nciku.com entry which has even more content like examples and stroke order animations.

If this extension sounds useful, please download the extension and check it out. As always, feel free to give us any feedback, suggestions or bug reports, either in the comments or by email to help [at] nciku [dot] com.

[Updated PS: We also updated our Firefox extension to work with Firefox 10. It won’t automatically update, but you can download the new version here]

In order to provide a more active and professional Q&A platform, we’ve just started a cooperation between the nciku Q&A and Tecent Soso Wenwen. Questions and answers on both sites will be shared so that you can get help from more native Chinese speakers, as well as helping Soso Wenwen users with their English questions. We will mark the questions and answers from Soso Wenen as “搜搜问问网友”.

We hope that this cooperation can help enhance both the nciku and Soso Wenwen Q&A boards, and help all our users in their language study. Thank you for all your continued support of nciku.

Dear nciku users,

We’re happy to announce that our popular Pinyin Translator is available once again. This service had previously been offline since Google Translate suspended their free API.

We’ve re-written the Pinyin Translator to use Youdao Fanyi for the translation back-end, in combination with our own hanzi-to-pinyin converter as before. So you can once again use nciku.com to translate English text or Hanzi characters to Chinese pinyin.

You can find a link to the Pinyin Translator on our Tools page, or click this link to go directly to the translator

As always, we welcome your opinions on this service.

- the nciku team

UPDATE: the new version of the pinyin translator had a bug that meant audio would not play properly in some cases. This has now been fixed - if you still have problems with the audio or any other feature of our pinyin translator, please feel free to let us know in the comments or by email at help (at) nciku (dot) com

Dear users,

As some of you might have noticed, the sections of our site that are powered by Google Translate, such as the ‘Translate Whole Sentence’ link when our dictionary has no exact results for your search term or the ‘Google Translate’ button below posts in our Q&A section, have not been working for the last few days.

We are no longer able to offer this service because Google has discontinued the free translation API that they were based on. We will therefore be removing these links shortly. We are sorry for the inconvenience.

Our pinyin translator also used Google for the English-to-Chinese and Chinese-to-English portions of the translation, so this feature is also not working at present. However, we are looking into alternative options for this and expect to have it working again in the next few days.

Thanks you for your understanding,

- the nciku team.

nciku is pleased to present a new addition to our ‘Games’ section: Empire Saga

Set in the Three Kingdoms period of Chinese history, this free multiplayer browser-based game lets you play the master of a small town, populated by cute monkeys. Construct and upgrade your town’s buildings, raise livestock, train soldiers to defend yourself or invade neighbors, and earn cash and experience by raiding nearby dungeons.

The game has an English version, so if you want to play a fun game based on Chinese history and culture, please register for Empire Saga now!

What will you be dressing as for Halloween? Here are 10 classic monsters in Chinese:

Zombies are well known in Chinese legends as well as Western movies.

The literal meaning of 吸血鬼 is “blood-sucking ghost”

Werewolves seldom appear in Chinese mythology - see 狐狸精 below for a distinctly Chinese form of shape-shifter.

Like werewolves, mummies are not a native Chinese monster but have mainly been imported through Western media.

Chinese folklore has many tales of ghosts helping or taking revenge on the living.

Just like in English, a 骷髅 isn’t always a terrifying monster - it can also mean the skeleton inside your body.

Chinese mythology doesn’t draw a line between male and female witches, but many people believed in sorcery and curses until the Qing dynasty.

In Chinese mythology, if an animal lives long enough it can turn into a demon.

This word usually only refers to intelligent humanoid aliens.

In Chinese mythology, a 狐狸精 (literally “fox spirit”) is a fox that can take the form of a beautiful woman.

Some users have complained of experiencing technical problems with our TTS (text-to-speech) service - the automatically-generated audio for nciku.com’s example sentences. We haven’t been able to reproduce this problem, so we are therefore asking for your assistance.

If you don’t hear anything when you press the ’speaker’ icon next to an example sentence, please send us the following information:

• If you use Windows, click the ’start’ button, then ‘Run…’ on the right column, then type “cmd” and click ‘ok’. In the command window, type tracert tts.nciku.com and press ‘Enter’
• If you use a Mac or Linux, open the Terminal (on Mac, click find, then applications > utilities > terminal), and type traceroute tts.nciku.com and press ‘Enter’

Then send us the information that appears in that window - the easiest way is to right-click on that window, click “Select All”, press control+c (Windows/Linux) / command+c (Mac) to copy the contents, then paste everything into an email to help(at)nciku.com .

Please bear with us as we try to solve this issue as soon as possible.

Note: On Mac, please use the command ‘traceroute’ rather than ‘tracert’.

Update:
You can now enjoy our TTS function again. Sorry for any inconvenience we may have caused and thanks again for your patience.

We have just released another update of the nciku Android Dictionary. Here are the new features we’ve added:

• Sentence Mode: if your search has multiple words and no exact matches, tap a word or character to see that word’s meaning
  
• Pre-built Vocab Lists: we’ve added 8 pre-built vocab lists based on the HSK and CET exams.
  

NOTE: You will have to re-download the dictionary data after installing this update. This is a very large file (>100MB) so please connect to WiFi before updating

If you found our list of Chinese characters by HSK level useful, you might also like this new tool: an HSK level indicator that colors Chinese characters based on their HSK level.

Type or paste your Chinese text in the box below, and click the “Mark Character Levels” button to color the text according to the HSK level of each character. Characters with lower HSK levels will appear in different shades of red, while those that only appear at higher levels will be colored blue, and characters that don’t appear in the HSK lists will stay black. You can also hover your mouse over a character to see its level.

Of course, even if the individual characters in a word has a low HSK level, that doesn’t necessarily mean that the word itself is easy - a lot of advanced vocabulary is made up of relatively simple characters. But the tool should still be useful enough to give you a general idea of how difficult a text is, and which characters you should concentrate on learning if you don’t know them.