i have been here a while and i noticed that there are a few threads about dictionaries and what not for pdas. i have chosen a few reference sources that seem to be pretty good for chinese speakers, and/or chinese learners. these dictionaries are pretty complete and use mdict and it is recommended that u use a unicode font such as arialuni.ttf as ur system font to see all phonetic tone changes and characters.

21st century*- a pretty decent english-chinese chinese-english dictionary that is pretty decent for something that is free( there are no phonetics though)

American Heritage- Well not a chinese dictionary, just a good english dictionary that is formated for mdict.

chinengengchindict*- this is by far the most complete free dictionary i have seen for chinese-english english-chinese, although similiar to 21st century, it lack phonetics.

chineseidioms*- as the name says this dictionary is for chinese idioms, it comes with phonetics for each entry, but doesn't come with english entries for all idioms.

phonetics*- this is mainly for those that are learning chinese as a second language, it uses a similiar to pinyin input where u just enter the letters for the pinyin and it'll show up with words that has the same pinyin but organized according for tones. also works when entering a chinese character( but beware as homophones would only net u one of the many pinyin)

thesarus- just and english thesarus to help you find the correct word and the correct time =D

additional software:
Free Chinese Input- not sure if found this on another thread or just google'd it up. but as far as i kno this is a pretty good free chinese input, that has character recognition, phonetic input(pinyin), as well as a character search. although i believe it lacks fonts, as always i recommend arialuni.ttf

any issues just leave a reply, hope this can be helpful

Thanks, this is a great reference. Are the links you provided for use on the PPC though? Could you also provide the URLs for the information, not just the downloads?

One Chinese Dictionary for PPC that I've tried is H&H English-Chinese Talking Dictionary. Expensive, but kind of fun.

I'm going to move this to Applications, since it applies not only to WM5 users.

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hmmm... the URLs for the information, well its all in chinese and i got most of it from http://soft.tompda.com/ and i googled the rest since some of the files were corrupt. plus i noticed the downloads were kinda slow so i uploaded them of orbitfiles.com
as for instructions on how to use this stuff, first u need to install mdict, which is provided by a link above, then copy all the downloaded .mdx files to you ppc anywhere would be fine. afterward you just open up mdict, goto the library menu and click add all library file to list.

Cool! Thanks for all your work. I'm going to give it a try.

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Ok, I got mdict plus the .mdx files set up just fine. The problem now is that the font doesn't load. Did you actually copy arialuni.ttf to your Windows\Fonts folder? It's 22MB or so! I used the utility Font on Storage to copy the font to my SD card, but I'm only seeing squares where the characters and symbols are supposed to be.

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yeah i copied the entire font to the windows file, and if that doesn't work u might want to install mobem's ce-star or refer to to view chinese characters, plus i used tweaks2k2 to change the system font to arial for to displaye the phonetics for 3rd tone. hope it works =D

Thank you for this. This helped me a lot.

I can't seem to find the function for looking up the Character's Pingyin. If I find a character I don't know how to read, I wouldn't know what to do about it.

Is there a function for this or a different dictionary-set for this?

Thanks.