Customer Reviews

HarperCollins Pocket Chinese Dictionary

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

 

 

The biggest drawback of this dictionary is that in the English-to-Chinese portion, the translations are written only in Chinese characters. For the novice or conversational Chinese student, this makes that half of the dictionary unusable, as there is no way to know how to pronounce the words.

In general, however, the layout of the dictionary is quite nice. The paper is thick enough that printing on the back of the page doesn't show through as it does in some dictionaries. Also, the word listings are printed in blue, which allows you to quickly scan a page when looking for a particular entry.

The Chinese-to-English section is actually quite nice. The words are ordered alphabetically by their pinyin pronunciations, and the listings are printed with both the Chinese character (in a larger font which makes it easier to see the details) and the pinyin phonetic spelling. There is also an index to look up Chinese words by character (using one of the stroke count systems).

Overall, the dictionary appears extremely well laid out and easy to use, but the lack of pinyin in the English-Chinese translations really makes the book useless for a beginner like me!

As mentioned by another reviewer, the lack of pinyin in the English to Chinese part of this dictionary is a huge problem; it means that if you look up an English word and want to know how to pronounce the Chinese equivalent, you need to look up the Chinese (which requires looking up each character by radical and stroke count). Likewise, to learn more about each character within the Chinese, you need to look up each one by radical and stroke count rather than going directly to the character (since the Chinese part of the dictionary is sorted by pinyin, with a radical/stroke index).

The Collins Chinese Concise Dictionary is very similar to this, but has that one glaring problem fixed, and is therefore much more useful. Its extra inch of width and half inch of height is definitely worth it.

I am a Chinese grew up in Hong Kong and finish high school before I came to America. Since my native dialect is Cantonese, I use this dictionary to learn pinyin. My comment here is only regarding the Chinese to English part: when I compare this dictionay to Pocket Oxford Chinese Dictionary ISBN 978-0-19-596-8330, I found that HarperCollin Pocket Chinese Dictionary has better and more Chinese phrases and idioms than the Oxford one. For me, I enjoy relearning those common and traditional Chinese phrases and idioms more in the HarperCollin dictionary.

However, for beginner/intermediate students wanting to learn Chinese, the Oxford Chinese Dictionary may be better overall:
1. The typeset is a little bigger and easier to read.
2. It has both Simplified and Traditional words.
3. It has pretty good translation overall.