MDBG Online Dictionary - My review

See also MDBG Online Dictionary - Tutorial

Having looked at most of the major online Chinese-English dictionaries, there is absolutely no contest as to which is the best for laowai trying to learn Chinese.

There are two ways to get to the MDBG Chinese-English dictionary:

www.xuezhongwen.net (easier to remember)
www.mdbg.net

While it might be confusing to get past the first screen, the actual user interface is by far the simplest out there. Other dictionaries are so cluttered I sometimes don't know where to type my query.

Strengths

1. Simple, easy-to-use interface
2. You can input English, pinyin, or hanzi characters in the same box (even at the same time) without switching modes
3. Accepts wildcards (*) when searching for a word (e.g. "chin*" gives you results including "China" and "Chinese")
4. Shows all entries containing your search or you can group (with "quotation marks") and or limit your search to exact matches
5. Pronounces pinyin syllables in an audio file (no need to download an extra plug-in)
6. Shows Cantonese pronunciation (Yale and Jyutping) for every hanzi character
7. Scissors tool that let's you see literal translation for every hanzi character in an entry
8. You can then select one hanzi character and see every entry that uses that character
9. Hanzi "sentence mode" that will translate every word in a big string of characters
10. Shows and recognizes traditional and simplified hanzi characters for every entry
11. Shows radicals needed to write each hanzi character
12. Shows stroke order and direction for each hanzi character (very useful if you want to write a new character)
13. Anyone can submit new entries or corrections to the dictionary. And my experience has been that they are actually reviewed and incorporated.
14. There are also a few other tools I never use including: hanzi character quiz, text annotation, and character encoding and converting for web pages

Weaknesses (a very weak list)

1. Limited vocabulary. It's, of course, a weakness of every dictionary. But just a warning that this dictionary doesn't have some English words (e.g. "obsequious") and doesn't recognize some Chinese compound words (wūhēi = dark, but it just told me the separate entries "crow" and "dark" without knowing it's a compound word)
2. Which word should I choose? Again, this is a common problem to most dictionaries. There are so many synonyms, it's impossible to know, for example, which or the words for "stubborn" is the one people really use (it seems to be gùzhí by the way).

Wish List

1. Proverb dictionary. Chinese people use a whole host of common little proverbs and idioms, often four words long. While this dictionary has some (e.g. "mǎ mǎ hū hū"), it would be nice if it could incorporate a comprehensive proverb dictionary to include phrases like:
   
   shèng lì zài wàng = victory is in sight
   xìng zāi lè huò = laughing at other people's disaster (German "schadenfreude")
2. Scientific/medical dictionary. It would be nice if the dictionary contained all kinds of medical terms such as "cortisone" or "hydrogen peroxide." Those can be very difficult to track down elsewhere.
3. Total results count at the top of each page. It currently shows to total SQL queries run ("Just 1 SQL query was processed for this result set in 0.568 seconds") but I would like to know how many results were returned so I can know, for example, how many "surnames" the dictionary knows.
4. "Did you mean..." link if I misspell something (like what Google does). I know, I'm lazy. But it would be nice.
5. Common use rating for Chinese words. The Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English shows "S1000" or "W3000" to mean "one of the top 1000 spoken words" and "one of the top 3000 written words," respectively. It would be a real coup if this dictionary had the same capability. Then we would know which word to choose from the dozens of synonyms.