Windows, Mac & Linux Chinese Readers!

I think this post is needed for all of you learners out there. I have already written about MDBG Chinese Reader, however for those who do not use Windows the program is useless. Therefore, I will show you a few tools that will be useful to you.

(These are all FREE!!)


MDBG Chinese Reader (Windows only)

Perapera-kun (Firefox) (All OSes)

Zhongwen (Chrome/Chromium) (All OSes)

Stardict (Linux, Mac, Windows)

Stardict isn’t as good as MDBG Chinese Reader, but it’s pretty much the only tool available for Linux, and one of the few for Mac. That being said, it does have many of the same features that MDBG Chinese Reader. You can highlight any word and a pop-up will appear with the definition. You can download it from the link above or from your distribution’s repositories.

Unfortunately, the website has not be kept up to date, so the dictionary files are out-of-date. However, I have created a Chinese-English dictionary for it using the same dictionary from MDBG.


Debian-based GNU/Linux

I made this bash script to simplify things. It will install Stardict if you don’t already have it and it will compile the dictionary straight from the source. Run it whenever you would like your dictionaries to be up to date.

Stardict CC-CEDICT script (Last updated 06/16/2011)

(Open it and change what is necessary for it to work on your system. It should be pretty straightforward if you read my comments.)


For Mac users and other GNU/Linux systems

Downloading the CC-CEDICT dictionary

You can download it from the link below. I will update it periodically so it does not go out of date.

Stardict CC-CEDICT dictionaries (Updated pretty much daily)

(Note: There are actually 2 dictionaries included. You need to install them both to be able to read both simplified and traditional scripts)

Installing the dictionaries

Extract the archive and move both the Simp_CC-CEDICT and Trad_CC-CEDICT folders to /usr/share/stardict/dic/ for Linux or /opt/gkt/usr/share/stardict/dic/ for Mac.