Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #70275 in Books
• Published on: 2004-05-20
• Original language: English, Chinese
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 614 pages

Customer Reviews

Highly useful
This is a practical and highly useful English-Chinese Chinese-English dictionary.

A full presentation for each word, including parts of speech, pronunciation guidance, pinyin [with tones], simplified and traditional characters, separate meanings ordered systematically, and sample phrases and sentences.

Practical and workmanlike - though you will need deep and heavy pockets to carry it [it is quite large!].

Very useful
I have been using this dictionary for over year and consider it indispensable. The softback edition is not too heavy and has survived an immense amount of use without any sign of wear. You may need a special pair of glasses though, as the chinese font sizes are quite small.

Huge selection of words but small Chinese font!
This handy dictionary contains just about every word you could ever need and more. However, there are some things I'd like to point out:

1) First of all, this dictionary isn't exactly "pocket size" as the product title suggest. It's probably about the same size as an average English dictionary which you'd have to lug around the house.

2) The text is quite small as well. This isn't too much of a problem when reading the English words but when reading the unfamiliar Chinese words and characters, it poses a bit of a problem since they are so many strokes/lines that make up most characters. I haven't had too many issues with it but if your sight is not so good, then you may want to fin magnifying a glass. Seriously, whatever your age, they are really handy for beginners!

3) The dictionary only contains Mandarin Chinese pronunciation even though the Chinese Characters shown are both Simplified (Mandarin) and Traditional (Cantonese). This became a slight problem for me as I was mainly learning Cantonese even though they're written almost the same.


Some very good points:

1) Like I said, it contains written characters from both Mandarin and Cantonese.

2) It contains a handy radical index in the middle which is very handy for a beginner who has never used a Chinese dictionary before.


Conclusion: I would definitely get this dictionary despite the points I raised above as it contains a vast variety of words (not just ones for beginners) and it contains both Simplified and Traditional characters.