Customer Reviews

Cheng & Tsui Chinese Character Dictionary: A Guide to the 2,000 Most Frequently-Used Characters

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I have been using this book for several years and find it to be an invaluable reference source for 1) characters that I have forgotten how to write, 2) new characters and 3) stroke order. What this book does not offer is a means to lookup words in English but this is not its intent, although a simple indexing of English words in alphabetical order with corresponding page numbers would be nice. However, since this is a "character" dictionary and not an "English to Chinese" dictionary this feature is understandably not part of the scope of this work. But, as a character dictionary of the most common simplified characters, this work excels! I strongly recommend it to any student of Chinese and I hope that Cheng and Tsui are able to follow-up on this excellent work with a traditional character version. It is estimated that a knowledge of the most frequently used 700 simplified characters enables an understanding of as much as 82% of the written language but that the ability to recognize and use the most common 2,000 characters bumps this percentage up to 97%. As an essential reference, Cheng and Tsui's "Chinese Character Dictionary" makes learning written Chinese that much easier.

This book goes through the 2000 most commonly used Chinese characters in a way that I haven't seen done before. It is very helpful because it includes just about every detail one would ever want to know about the character. One aspect that I appreciated was how it gave the character with other characters to show its many meanings. It was helpful to see the order of strokes needed to write the characters properly. For those who are studying Chinese on their own or through a class, this is a great book.

On the whole, this is a very good character dictionary. The characters are given in both Kai and Song typeface. Each character is also placed (in red) on a grid so the correct proportions can be seen. Separately, the stroke order is clearly delineated via a series of strokes until the complete character is drawn. The corresponding Pinyin word is given, usually accompanied by two or three compound words and their English meanings. My major complaint is that the Pinyin word corresponding to the character is not always defined. For instance, the entry for ke(4) does not tell you that it means class, lesson, or course. However, three compounds and their definitions are given: keben (textbook), kewai (extra-curricular/after class), and gongke (schoolwork/homework). Giving the basic definition of the character would seem to be important, and wouldn't be much trouble. In fact, some of the entries give the basic definition, but not all of them. This oversight prevents me from rating the dictionary at 5 stars. Otherwise, for the small size of the book, it packs quite a bit of information.

I bought this book on the recomendation of my Mandarin instructor. Most of the characters we are covering in our class are in this book and it's the best resource I have found for figuring out how to write the characters correctly. If you are looking for a way to look up characters using pinyin and find out their stroke order, you should find this book helpful.

Very helpful guide---other guides I've seen have been older, with the full etymology of the words/characters, but they were of little help because they hadn't been updated to Simplified Characters. This one is the best because it cuts across two or three different ways of helping you with Mandarin: 1) it's arranged by Pinyin, alphabetically---not by stroke order; 2) it has a full index in the VERY FRONT containing every character listed by Stroke Order and what page to find it on, if you don't know the pinyin for any given character; and 3) for each character, it gives you the printed (in books---the boxy-looking) version, the written (hand-writing it) version, the radical(s) involved and the stroke order, in a visual sequence. Also, for each entry, it gives similar words/phrases using that word/character. This is also a good guide because it has the most-used 2000 characters. The books with 100, 200 or even 500 are not enough. It's a small, paperback size, too, so it fits easily in your hand and it's easy to flip pages around, which happens a lot when you're looking for a Mandarin character!!

I am a seventh grade student taking Chinese and whenever I need help on the stroke orders I instantly turn to this book. It really has helped me improve my characters a lot!!

The book shows how to correctly draw the character proportionately and using the correct stroke order, but it just has simplified characters.

First and foremost, I have been studying mandarin for three years now. I have HSK level 3, and if I had to guess I would say that I can recognize half of the characters in the book.

As a guide to Chinese characters it is fairly useful, the stroke-count index was reliable enough, but I was hoping for something that would be a bit more like oxford's concise dictionaries. Before I bought this, I was thinking it would list characters and then their various definitions, examples of how to use hem in sentences, etc. But I have other, inexpensive, easy-to-use programs that can aid me with this part of learning on my iPhone. You will need to keep an electronic dictionary at your side in order to refine how certain terms are used in sentences.

Aside from that, I bought this book in following the example of Malcolm X, who read a dictionary from start to finish while he was in prison. So, I bought this in the essence and mentality of improving my Chinese to the best of my ability. And to that end, it has been fulfilling. By the time I am done with this dictionary, there will be a total of 2,000 characters that I can read.

book was in excellent condition-very helpful for beginners in learning the language