Customer Reviews

English-Cantonese Dictionary

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This dictionary just came out as a companion to the Yale-in-China Chinese to English dictionary. It has a lot of the charm of the earlier volume: waterproof cover, handy size, useful appendices on grammar and pronunciation, and broad vocabulary. The English is not excessively British, and there are a lot of idioms which are nicely translated into equivalent Cantonese phrases. That being said, there are several real problems:
1. There are printing errors in the pronunciation section where the IPA symbol for Cantonese phoneme "s" is the IPA letter pronounced "sh"--a BAD error, especially for beginners, especially as Cantonese uses no "sh" sound.
2. There are many English spelling errors, not such a big deal most times.
3. Worse, there are errors in the Cantonese transliteration, putting in entirely wrong words by leaving out letters. This was a minor problem in the earlier Chinese-to-English book in only a few words. But when you're using the book to learn the pronunciation, such errors are especially annoying.
4. English synonyms often have different Cantonese translations, for instance check out "maybe" and "perhaps"--this is a minor problem.
5. There are no Chinese characters in this book. While it makes the printing a lot simpler, it hinders the mastery of phrases, not knowing the precise meaning of particles which are homonyms with identical English spelling and tone, but different connotations in Cantonese. If you want to write a translation, you're on your own! I'm not sure this was a great editorial decision.
6. As always happens in a first edition, many idioms are lacking, but I can't complain too much about this.
7. The books are somewhat flimsy--my copy of the earlier text is about 3 months old, and a section has already fallen out. For a reference book, this is not good.
Overall, not a bad reference for pronunciation of Cantonese, with some useful grammar, but with significant flaws.

Probably the worst language dictionary I have used so far.
I am attempting to learn my 2nd asian language and find this dictionary to be of almost no value whatsoever.
I have some major issues with this book:
1) For starters, there are no "Chinese" characters in the book, making it nearly impossible to truly learn the language.
2) The publisher of this dictionary claims to have "15,000 of the most popular words and phrases", yet a majority of the words are obscure deriviatives of common words or will never come up in daily conversation.
- For example, how often have you used the following words: "Cogent","Elf Land","Quayage", or "Trepang"???
3) Worst of all, there are various spelling errors in both the English and Cantonese languages.

Not a bad reference, but not very useful for the beginner.

This book's one short coming is that it does not include the Chinese characters to go with the Yale Romanized Cantonese words so that if you need to translate something you need another book. So it is a very good book for looking up the pronunciation of the Cantonese word you need, but of no help at all in translation of written characters. If I could afford only one book, it would be the Chinese?English version, but if I could have two books, this is a good addition.

This dictionary isn't perfect but it's very decent. The dictionary uses yale pronunciation. It does not have chinese characters. It does however have most of the words you would use in daily life. Another thing I like about the dictionary is that it gives you the measure word for the nouns. I can't even begin to tell you how essential that is. I recommend all Cantonese learners to buy this book. It's one of the best Cantonese dictionaries out there.

The dictionary is a great step for learners of Cantonese. However, what would help would be separating each word so for each word it is not a complete string of roman letters. For example, the word "computer" is two characters in Cantonese but would appear as "xyzasb" in the dictionary. Chinese is character based so separating the pin yin words would greatly help. Using the same example, then this would be "xyz abc". Furthermore, why not just throw in the Chinese characters to make the dictionary complete and appeal to all levels of competency and learning styles?