Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #386931 in Books
• Published on: 2005-01-20
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 550 pages

Customer Reviews

An outstanding dictionary
An excellent dictionary for students with some familiarity with Chinese, or Japanese, characters. It groups together characters with the same sound element. This helps memorisation and frequently makes you go "Oh, so that's why it's pronounced that way." It is not an exhaustive dictionary, and needs to be complemented by a larger traditional dictionary for anyone interested in reading texts. It is the most used Chinese dictionary that I have - I have far too many dictionaries of Chinese but this is the one I always take with me.

Very useful, though not the only dictionary you'll ever need
This dictionary is both genuinely useful and a fascinating book in itself. It won't be the only Chinese dictionary you ever need, but it's an excellent (and very different) complement to, say, John deFrancis' alphabetical pinyin dictionary.

It's organised around a system of charts linking characters by elements other than the radical, such as primary phonetic components. This takes a bit of learning but together with the usual radical index, it really does make it much easier to find an unknown character and to remember where you found it.

I actually found the book easier to use than its associated website, because everything seems clearer and more spacious. My only real problem with it is that the simplified characters are very minimally treated -- I appreciate this is intentional, but an appendix describing the main types of simplification would have been great.

Finding out about characters
This is a fascinating little reference book, a must. I only wish that the font was larger - small is fine for travelling, but not for study. (Also, for dictionary compilers: is there _any_ dictionary that has a radical chart on a fold out page for easy reference?)