Recently Kottke pointed to a piece on Snarkmarket with a back and forth about the value of single use digital devices. The back and forth is interesting, and the conclusions reached — that multi-purpose devices were the trend, but the focus should be on integrated devices, rather than just devices with multiple, distinct functions.
I’m a huge fan of general purpose devices. I don’t own a Kindle (they don’t really work that well in China), but I read a ton of Kindle ebooks … on my iPhone and my netbook. I envision a near future when that iPhone/netbook distinction disappears, and I just hook up a peripheral screen and keyboard to my phone when I have a place to work. It’s something that has gotten me excited for the better part of a decade.
One place, though, where I am totally in love with a clunky, un-networked, thoroughly unsexy single use device is my electronic dictionary. I picked up a Casio EW-V3800H a little more than a year ago at a store near 上海书城 on Fuzhou Lu for somewhere a bit less than RMB 2,000, and I’ve been in love ever since. There are probably better dictionaries (the Canon Wordtanks are just incredible, but also hard to find in China), but I like mine. For a reasonably advanced student of Chinese and neophyte Japanese learner like me, it’s hard to beat.
After reading the above linked article, though, I wondered why exactly I liked it so much, and I think the reason is exactly because it’s fugly and disconnected. When I sit down with my dictionary, there are no distractions. There’s no IM windows popping up, no MP3 collection asking for another play, no piles of work waiting to get done. It’s just me and some of the world’s best Chinese and Japanese dictionaries.
There are some things I wish it did. I would love an easier way to transfer sentences and definitions from the dictionary to my computer (for Anki card creation). A built in e-reader that I could load texts on and then look words up in the dictionary would set my heart a-flutter. These things more than likely exist on other, better dictionaries, or will exist in the nearish future.
For now, though, my and my ugly little Casio are quite happy together, studying, without distractions.
Related posts:
- AJATT for Chinese
- The tyranny of a single source of information
- Heisig, SRS, and my experience with learning Chinese characters
- ChinaPlates 1.1 is in the wild, go download!
- One language or many, take two
{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }
I agree. My electronic dictionary is much less frustrating to use than my phone or computer when looking up definitions. I think this is partly for the reason you stated (no distractions) but also because it’s very fast at it. With the phone/computer, I have to wait for it to boot (if it’s off) and then load up the problem. With the e-dict, I just turn it on. Poof. It’s like magic in comparison.
Do you take it everywhere ? That’s when I find a phone+Pleco much better than a dedicated device. It is not slower to look up word either, I just have Pleco always started so there isn’t any boot time.
Jean,
That’s absolutely true. I do take it lots of places (it’s in my daily kit, along with my netbook and various other electronic dongles), but it’s not as ubiquitous as my iPhone. Unfortunately, unlike when I was using Pleco on my Windows Mobile phone, you can’t just start the iPhone version and have it available for use instantly, so there is a pretty significant delay — I’d say at least 30 seconds from phone unlock to word definition — for me on my first gen iPhone, but that’s a limitation of the phone, not the software. There’s no doubt that the ubiquity of the phone is a big plus, though.