When I was younger, I wasted a lot of time on traditional wuxia, xianxia, fantasy, and time-travel novels. I thought I had read widely, having gone through most of the so-called top-tier and solid recommendations. By middle age, those books felt like weeds: endless, but with little nourishment. I began reading drier, more serious works.
The more I read, the more I realized how much I did not know. I rarely got the deep, wine-like absorption the ancients described; more often I felt irritated. Worse, in classical Chinese I would hit two or three unfamiliar characters in every hundred, and many more that looked familiar but whose exact meaning I could not pin down. A dictionary was necessary. But I do not like reading properly at a desk. I prefer a book in one hand and a pencil in the other, slumped on the sofa or propped against the headboard. A large printed dictionary is inconvenient there; a phone app has an obvious advantage.
Two years ago I installed Xinhua Zidian and Xinhua Cidian on my phone. They were probably pirated copies, downloaded from forum links. The character coverage was broad and they worked well. But because they were pirated and asked for a lot of permissions, I never stopped worrying about security. Around two years ago I found Baidu Hanyu. It was free, convenient, and could recognize characters from a photo, so I promptly uninstalled the two pirated dictionaries. After that I discovered, to my dismay, that Baidu Hanyu had serious gaps: many characters were simply missing. It is fine for middle-school students, but not really enough for an adult. The two dictionaries I had removed were not available in Huawei App Market, so I had to look for something else.
I looked at Commercial Press's Xinhua Zidian and found it was only a character dictionary, not a word dictionary. Comments also said the paid version pushed aggressive ads and had incomplete coverage, which wrecked my good impression of it. With Xinhua Zidian ruled out, Hanyu Zidian 2020 looked more popular and had decent reviews; its paid version supposedly did not show ads. I bought it without hesitation. After buying it, I was still not satisfied. First, coverage remained incomplete, with many characters missing. Second, it had no photo lookup, and radical lookup was less efficient than flipping through a paper dictionary. Third, it was cluttered with functions I did not need.
Like other apps, it bundles elementary-school vocabulary and classical poetry study, plus stroke-order animations. For anyone who is not a primary or middle-school student, those features are mostly useless.
A dictionary is a basic tool for learning Chinese, and it matters for both language learning and cultural continuity. Yet there is still no clean, genuinely usable app. Commercial Press's Xinhua Zidian, Xinhua Cidian, and Gu Hanyu Cidian have accompanied two generations and are classic tools. Since they went digital, however, the dictionaries developed around them have drawn a lot of criticism. The problem is probably not technical but commercial.
To promote Chinese and Chinese culture abroad, China has built many Confucius Institutes and established mutual 'cultural years' with various countries, with considerable investment. At home, since the 1990s, attention and investment in Chinese learning have lagged behind English learning, which was tied to the opening-up policy. In recent years the state has recognized the problem and strengthened Chinese education again. But reference works are like infrastructure. In the past the state organized experts to compile dictionaries, and that is how the classics were made. Now the classic editions belong to Commercial Press, and in the digital age the press puts economic interests first rather than the social responsibility of a basic reference tool. That is why the paper classics, once moved to electronic versions, have been so widely criticized.
Why can't the state buy out the rights to Xinhua Zidian, Xinhua Cidian, and Gu Hanyu Cidian and provide free electronic editions to the public? Or organize experts to compile a new, more comprehensive edition? The Kangxi Dictionary contains more than 47,000 characters. We may value simplification now, but an electronic dictionary that includes only around 7,000 characters leaves us unable to read ancient texts or carry on traditional culture. If Chinese people themselves cannot learn traditional culture thoroughly, how can they promote it to the world?