Wednesday, September 19, 2012

iOS 6 Has New Reference Dictionaries

I have found that iOS 6 will download reference dictionaries for Spanish,  French and German if you hit the "define" item for a word in those languages.   This feature is buried in the release notes.  There is also a Chinese dictionary, as mentioned on Apple's "new feature" page.


12 comments:

Joe said...

Oddly when I try to define a Chinese word, only Japanese definitions appear.

Anonymous said...

When I click on define, it is still only showing English. Could you please share how to get definition for Chinese? Thanks!

Tom Gewecke said...

Joe -- Do you have Chinese higher than Japanese on your Language settings list?

Tom Gewecke said...

Anonymous -- Are you clicking on a Chinese word? That is essential.

Joe said...

@Tom: On iOS 6 Can you set the order of languages in iOS? The only ordering setting I can find is the keyboards setting; there, I have (1) English (2) Chinese - Traditional (Handwriting) (3) Chinese - Traditional (Pinyin) (4) Japanese (Romaji) (5) Korean. And yes, I was clicking on Chinese words & characters (definitely not Japanese variants).

Tom Gewecke said...

Joe -- you can set the order by switching the OS to Chinese and then back to English.

Anonymous said...

Tom, thanks. I was click on English word in hoping it will show Chinese definition....

Anonymous said...

Where is this feature? In which app?

Tom Gewecke said...

The dictionaries should be available in all apps when you are using the appropriate language.

Anonymous said...

Hello Tom. I'm having a problem with the iOS 6 dictionaries and I thought you might have some insight.

There appears to be a bug with the Japanese to English dictionary. Have you heard of it or dealt with it? In iOS 5, selecting a Japanese word while the device was otherwise set to English would give an English definition. It doesn't now.

It seems that since these new dictionaries were added (and have to be downloaded separately), the Japanese dictionary has been broken. Japanese monolingual and English to Japanese work, but not J to E. After poking around in the files I noticed some differences between 5 and 6. Dictionaries are in a completely different place now. I tried to see if I could find the problem and fix it but it's too different from 5 and I can't tell.

I've found that disabling the Japanese keyboards will completely get rid of the "Define" option for Japanese words, and it won't show back up again until you re-enable the keyboards. I was able to get it to try to download a Japanese dictionary while set to English once but when it finished it just said "No definition found."

I have followed various instructions online, such as changing the language, deleting the keyboards, and changing the order, but nothing works.

It wouldn't bother me if I could just see that Apple is aware of the bug.

Thanks.

Tom Gewecke said...

Lots of people have reported the problem with the Japanese - English dictionary. There is no way for the user to fix it as far as I know, we just have to wait for Apple to do this.

Anonymous said...

I figured as much. That's what I've seen too. Thank you. I was hoping 6.1 would fix it, but evidently not.