A Study On The Use Of Italian Chinese Learner’s Dictionary Application Pleco

The use of smart dictionaries has far exceeded that of paper dictionaries.Correctly understanding the strengths and weaknesses of smart dictionaries can effectively help Chinese learners make better use of it.Through the survey of Italian Chinese learners,the author chose Pleco,a dictionary application popular among the most learners.This article studies Pleco’s methods of retrieval,interpretation,use cases,and functions to understand its advantages and disadvantages.Then it investigates the attitudes and evaluation of learners and Chinese teachers,and proposes optimization suggestions to Pleco,and provides functional reference suggestions for Chinese learners and Chinese teachers to effectively use the dictionary.First of all,this article uses the Android 3.2.43 version of Pleco as a benchmark to study its basic functions.The author selects 100 words through the "Chinese Level Vocabulary and Outline of Chinese Character Levels" and searches through Pleco to study its search results presentation,interpretation,expansion,use cases and other functions to analyze the application as comprehensively as possible.Secondly,through the survey and interviews,this article found that Pleco is welcomed by Italian Chinese learners for the following reasons:convenience,efficiency,and comprehensiveness.Among them,learners especially like this application to provide stroke order writing for some words.This is very important for Italian learners,because for them,the biggest difficulty in learning Chinese is to write Chinese characters.This function can help them solve the biggest pain points.Admittedly,both advantages and disadvantages coexist.In terms of part-of-speech tagging,interpretation of some words,and use cases,they still need to be optimized and improved.After all,smart dictionaries are different from paper dictionaries.Although they have a large capacity and are updated quickly,they still have a lot of problems in terms of consistency in interpretation and use cases,and practicality of use cases.Finally,this paper provides relevant suggestions based on the above findings and problems,which plays a role in promoting the maximum value of smart applications.