2 ms·

The dictionary is sourced from Google Translate and Unihan, with a few hundred manual edits. Click the Edit button to fix it if you already speak Chinese and fi

• thaumasiotes 9y ago
  In the sentence 我长得不漂亮 "I am not pretty", 得 is de(toneless), the result marker, not 得 dé, the verb meaning "obtain". 不 really is the negative particle (that is to say, it is being glossed appropriately), but before a syllable in fourth tone it is pronounced bú, not bù. I actually agree that word-by-word glossing like that is helpful, but this tool is doing a questionable job. Words that are more syntactic than semantic will be nearly impossible to fit into a word-by-word-gloss system -- for example, the ABC dictionary's gloss of "result 得" from the sentence above is "subordinating particle used to link a verb [or adjective] and the manner clause that follows it". This is difficult to condense into something that it would make sense for your app to render. In the sentence 我的狗去世了 "my dog has died", 了 is the change-of-state particle, appropriate because my dog (presumably) used to be alive, but it's dead now. It's definitely not a verb; the verb is, depending on your perspective, 去世 "die" or just 去 "go". If you're interested in my advice, I think the highest-value thing you can do to get good glosses is get Pleco for your smartphone and purchase the ABC Dictionary and Tuttle Learner's Dictionary addons. It'll be less convenient than your app, but much higher quality. (Detection of word boundaries is imperfect; google translate may actually be better at that particular task.)