Customer Reviews

Chinese-English Frequency Dictionary: A Study Guide to Mandarin Chinese's 500 Most Frequently Used Words (English and Mandarin Chinese Edition)

5 star:		(12)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This is actually a dictionary of the 500 most common Chinese characters ("hanzi"), not words(it has several words listed under each character). However, it is not a true character dictionary either since it does not show how to write characters and you can only look up the character by frequency or by the pronounciation, which a student often won't know. In a true character dictionary you can look up the character by stroke count, radical or pronounciation.

However, while the lookup methods could be improved, the definitions are outstanding. Unlike a character dictionary (like the excellent "Reading and Writing Chinese" published by Tuttle), which provides a basic meaning or two along with a few examples of words that use the character, this book provides all meanings of the character along with many examples. Most helpful of all is the explanation of characters which are related to the grammar structure. For example, the aspect particle "le", the "to be" verb "shi", and the "at" and current tense aspect marker "zai" each have about a page and a half explanation along with example words and sentences.

It should be noted that only simplified characters are used in this book (simplified characters are used in mainland China while complex or traditional characters are used in Taiwan and Hong Kong). Also, all example words and sentences are shown both in characters and in pinyin (the romanization system used for pronounciation).

I found this book to be a good complement to both a standard character dictionary and a regular dictionary. I would rate it a 5 if it contained 1) a more complete lookup system (stroke count, radical, etc) 2) writing information for each character and 3) complex characters as well, at least in the entry listing if not in all of the examples.

I concur with the previous reviewers on the overall quality of the book. The examples are nicely chosen, and while the English equivalents could occasionally stand some improvement, that's just a minor quibble. It's always useful to have a wordlist ordered by frequency of usage -- surely the most efficient general review strategy. For those of us in the over-50 set the type size is definitely on the small side, but the print quality is clear nevertheless. A magnifier or right-up-to-the-nose viewing both work well; again a quibble.

The formatting facilitates concentrating on the Chinese, too: just highlight the character text on your first pass, then ignore all the other stuff on subsequent passes. Accuracy is good, with silly errors seemingly scarce (incorrect tone mark here and there in the examples, or an occasional word lapse [e.g., the pinyin for 'xiabian de shu' is given as 'shangbian de shu' on p. 24]).

Having spent about 800 one-on-one hours with a tutor over the past year, I've lately realized that in the heat of stimulating day-to-day discussions, new and reviewed vocabulary have taken somewhat of a back seat. Yong Ho's book has provided a very easy and profitable way to pass commuting time (but only if you're a rider, not a driver!).

I'm familiar with many of the student dictionaries available nowadays: favorites, for various reasons, are the Cheng & Tsui Pinyin Learner's Dictionary (ISBN 0887273165) and the newest Century Edition of the New English-Chinese Dictionary (ISBN 7532725421), along with Wenlin for the Macintosh (incorporating the DeFrancis ABC Dictionary). But for quick and painless spare-time review, this one has the right size, shape, content, and price.

Several years ago I swore off any product produced by Hippocrene Books, having wasted good money on some perfectly useless introductory material (in a language other than Chinese). This book has certainly raised them a notch in my eyes.

If I had to choose a single book for learning/reviewing Mandarin Chinese (Putonghua) this is the one. I have been learning Mandarin for about 2 years now and purchased many other Chinese learning texts and this book is the best. One of my favorite features is to open up the book at a random character and see if I can understand the sample sentences without looking at the accompanying Pinyin. If I miss a character, I find the corresponding Pinyin and look it up in the alphabetical index. Of course there are characters used in the sample sentences that are not in the top 500 and I have other dictionaries for this purpose (this book only deals systematically with 500 most common characters from most common to least). As other reviewers have mentioned the detailed grammatical explanations of many characters (e.g. de/le/shi/guo) are invaluable for general understanding.

I bought this book kind of on a whim. I've been studying Chinese very part-time for a few years, and I'm beyond the beginner stage, but not quite to intermediate.

I'm not normally one to read dictionaries, but once I started on this one, it became more and more fascinating. Why? Because it tied together bits and pieces of knowledge that I'd been accumulating ever since my first (and only) formal Chinese classes.

This book is not simply a dictionary of the 500 most common characters (simplified, like in the PRC). For each character, its main senses (or meanings) and usages are listed and explained in a clear and plain manner, with very appropriate (and simple) examples. That's the part that I found most helpful and most intriguing. It's like, "I thought I had recognized that character in that context when I was reading something a while ago, and now I can see how it works." or "Now I see how the two senses of that character are tied up with two different pronunciations."

It was almost like a grammar review of all basic Chinese, but organized by characters rather than some arbitrary "simple to complicated" sequence like you'd find in a typical textbook.

Also, for each character, many words are listed that use it -- most of them with the character in question as the first syllable, but also a few where it is not. These words are defined, of course.

In short, if you can find this book at a reasonable price (like I did - on ebay) get it. I consider the strategy of learning the most common characters, as opposed to words (see a previous review pointing out that this book actually covers 500 characters, not words), a useful approach.

However, I draw your attention to the following omissions:

*Multi-reading characters are not noted. If I'm studying a character, I'd want to know that it has another reading.

*The entries begin at the most common character and work downwards. Fine. But often the most common disyllable for any given character will not begin with that character. It will begin with another character, followed by the character in question. The author simply doesn't mention any of these, regardless of their popularity.

*No mention is made of the traditional form/s of the characters. People on the 'mainland' may think this is a waste of time anyway. But if you really want to know Chinese characters well, the more the better. Also, more than once I have found that learning the fantizi (traditional form of the character) has enabled me to distinguish between two confusing simplified characters.

*No cross referencing to synonyms, antonyms or potentially confusing characters.

*As mentioned by a previous reviewer, more indexes. Some Japanese dictionaries have three indexes. There are many different ways to locate a Character (see my review of Character Indexes of Modern Chinese (Scandinavian Institute of Asian Studies Monograph) by N.H. Leon ISBN: 0700701346), which indexes the characters in four ways.

*No stroke-order guidance. Little on this needs to be said, except that I'm NOT in favour of a demonstration of the stroke order of each character by having it drawn over and over again with progresssively more strokes to show which follows which. Where do the strokes begin and end? This method also takes up too much space. A far preferred way is used in Kanji & Kana: A Handbook of the Japanese Writing System by Wolfgang Hadamitzky and Mark Spahn (ISBN: 0804820775). They simply show the character in a nice, neat, large size. At the BEGINNING of the first stroke, for example, there's a small 1 followed by a small 2 at the BEGINNING of the second stroke and so on. This is dignified and visually appealing.

This book isn't the only one which makes such omissions. Take Oxford/Foreign Language Press E-C/C-E dictionaries, for example. Alternatives to this book can be found amongst my other reviews.

I DON'T think that, just because many of us have studied far more than 500 characters, this book looks at TOO FEW characters. The approach with this book is to look at common words in greater detail, and I find this very useful. For example, before coming to China I thought I had a thorough appreciation of the word hao3 (good). But I found that often this word is used for "very", such as hao3 lei4 (very tired) hao3 ke3ai4 (very cute). This is where this book is worthy of our careful attention.

I don't want to be too harsh. Please note at the beginning of this review I did say that I actually recommend the book, for a reasonable price.

The 500-word list is WRITTEN frequency, not SPOKEN. Although the lists of the two differ slightly, the difference is significant. However, as a WRITTEN Chinese list, the book is well-organized and very effective. It is a permanent and often-used part of my Chinese study resources.

This is an outstanding and useful book for the serious learner of Chinese. By nature, the lexical resources of the Chinese language are limited -- most conversations and written material are made up of a very limited number of words, and compounds made up of those monosyllabic words. The author of this book focuses on developing a solid grasp on those fundamental building blocks. I have found the book more useful than most grammars and dictionaries for developing my fluency in the language. I highly recommend it.

This is a great book for studying Chinese, however, it is helpful to have some limited vocabulary before beginning to use it. Once you know how to pronounce words based on their pinyin spelling and tones, and you know a couple hundred words, then this book is great for building vocabulary and learning grammar through context usage examples. And, of course, it focuses on the words you will most likely encounter, so what you learn will be quite practical. I really like this book and study it for the examples.

Other features of the book have been noted by other reviewers, but what I want to highlight are the example sentences to illustrate the many uses of each character in context. Especially for words with many roles in the language (the three de's for example) these sentences are an excellent way to prepare your own pattern practice. They are written in characters and then pinyin in parens, allowing you to focus on only the characters if you are that far. The sentences mostly use the other 499 characters in simple but typical phrases, so the entries reinforce each other.

Just one example, for zong3 (frequency 152): Four meanings are given, and 9 compounds (e.g. zong3delai1shuo1 'generally speaking'). For each meaning there is a sentence, e.g. for the fourth meaning 'sooner or later, eventually': wo3 zong3 you3 yi4tian1 hui4 you3 zi4ji1de fang1zi ("sooner or later I'll have my own house"); all the characters in this useful sentence are also in the book, and although the grammar is not explicitly explained here (as it is for 'grammatical' entries such as the de's) the structure is simple enough to infer it. This example also shows typical uses of hui4 and you3; so this sentence reinforces the discussions of those characters, which are easy to cross-reference via the alphabetic index.

Stroke order and radicals are not the point here! Get Tuttle "Reading and Writing Chinese" for the first and a good dictionary for the second. The beauty of this book is that it emphasizes the most *frequent* (as it says) characters, so you can most rapidly approach fluency in common speech and reading, only having to look up the less frequent characters.

A good companion for the two Yong Ho books on Chinese mandarin. It helps to understand better some grammar and idiomatic aspects of the language. The only complaint I have is the printing types are so small that the reader has to strain his eyes to read it!