Customer Reviews

Far East 3000 Chinese Character Dictionary (Chinese Edition)

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I have several Chinese dictionaries and always find myself using this one.

It is well organized in Pinyin order, and has indexes for looking up characters by radical, and by Taiwan phonetic symbols.

All characters have illustrations showing stroke order.

I LOVE this book! I think it's very well designed to be extremely user friendly. There are 5 different indices, which makes it very easy to find the word you're looking for, eg by pinyin, zhuyin, radical, stroke number, and frequency. I especially love the frequency index. I used this index to learn the most commonly appearing words first; this radically boosted my reading proficiency and thus my interest in learning more Chinese. This is also a great guide for people interested in learning both traditional and simplified characters. If you are interested in learning Chinese, this is a must have.

Having lived in Taiwan as a missionary, I had to learn the language and communicate well with the people. This book is excellent for helping you learn new characters and new usage of ones you already know. It only cover 3000 of the more common ones, so if your vocab is higher than that, it may not help much. But for the beginner, it is great.

Great for looking up the Chinese pinyin. Easy to locate and to read the print. Relaxed and enjoyable style of presentation...like having 4 mini flash cards to a page. Lots of information yet not crowded. Chinese pinyin and character with English definition, stroke order well represented, and several uses of the form also presented. Even lists Mali, for the name Mary, as one of the uses of ma3.

An excellent reference for stroke order, meaning, and common compounds, this book covers traditional characters. Students looking for simplified characters should look for the "Far East 3000 Chinese Character Dictionary (Simplified Chinese Version)."

I agree with the other reviewers on the value of this book -- attractive type, nice glosses (not full dictionary entries) and examples. It is especially useful because it is based on traditional characters (''''as used in Taiwan and Hong Kong. The simplified characters (''') are also shown (although not with their stroke order) so even if you are studying mainland Chinese you can use the book. The added value of the traditional characters is (1) they often contain more information to give a hint on the meaning or pronunciation of the word; (2) some simplifications combined two or more traditional characters, leading to great confusion for the learner; here we see the two forms separately. For example song1 "pine tree" ' and "loose, slack" ' are both simplified to ', I suppose under the supposition that the context will always make it clear. But in this dictionary we see them separate, and the etymology is much clearer -- the "pine tree" is a phonetic in the "loose".

This character dictionary is great. It can't take the place of a regular dictionary, but then again, it isn't meant to.

Here are some features that I especially like:
- Nice, big characters (especially helpful with some of the dense, high stroke-count traditional characters)
- Gives alternate pinyin pronunciation for those '''duo1yin1zi4
- Not only does it include common terms for each character, but (when possible) it also gives a 4-character expression that uses the character (typically a cheng2yu'3')

If you are serious about studying Chinese characters as you study Chinese as a whole, this book is a must-have.