Let the Sunshine In: Software support engineer in Tokyo

I use this Chinese dictionary daily. It was just updated yesterday.

MDBG Chinese-English dictionary - CC-CEDICT download

Chinese to English dictionary with pronunciation in pinyin

Well, actually you can 'grep' this dictionary by English word. So, this is "English to Chinese" dictionary at the same time. I think this applies to most electronic dictionaries.

Pinyin used in this dictionary is different from the 'official' one for good reasons. It's very intuitive. I think those who knows official pinyin can learn this in 5 minutes.

Pinyin - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

most commonly used romanization system for Standard Mandarin

The beauty of dictionary being in plain text is you can grep it. So, here's my bash function to look up the dictionary.

$ declare -f ch
ch () 
{ 
    unzip -p ~/cedict_1_0_ts_utf-8_mdbg.zip cedict_ts.u8 | \grep -E --color "$*"
}

I search for words pronounced 'yan' in 3rd tone and 'jing' in any tone. And something related to 'eye'.

$ ch yan3 jing.*eye
擦亮眼睛 擦亮眼睛 [ca1 liang4 yan3 jing1] /remove the scales from one's eyes/sharpen one's vigilance/
眼睛 眼睛 [yan3 jing5] /eye/
眼鏡 眼镜 [yan3 jing4] /spectacles/eyeglasses/CL:副[fu4]/