Customer Reviews

Mandarin Chinese Dictionary: Chinese-English (Dover Language Guides)

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This is a review of the Mandarin Chinese-English Dictionary: Chinese-English by Fred Fangyu Wang. (There is also an English-Chinese volume of this dictionary, which I have not looked at yet.)

This is actually a very good dictionary, but only for a very narrow group of readers. If you are learning Chinese, and do not have any other dictionary, this is NOT the one you should start out with. However, if you already have a good basic Chinese-English dictionary, and you are still not satisfied with your fluency in modern Chinese, this will be a worthwhile addition to your collection.

This dictionary is organized phonetically according to Pinyin romanization (with tone marks), with a radical index in the back. (If you do not know what I'm talking about, then this dictionary is not for you, and you do not need to read on.) Perhaps its greatest weakness is that it is far from comprehensive. Really, no dictionary is, not even the Hanyu Da Cidian. But there are plenty of fairly common compound expressions that you will not find here. A further quirk is that the entries are arranged alphabetically by WORDS, rather than by SYLLABLES. For example, in a standard dictionary, JIUJING ("grain alcohol") would be right before JIULIANG ("ability to hold one's liquor"), because both begin with the syllable JIU ("alcohol"). But in this dictionary JIUJING and JIULIANG are separated by JIUJINSHAN ("San Francisco") and JIUJIU ("maternal uncle") and JIU/alcohol occurs two pages earlier, because the organization is strictly alphabetical by complete words.

However, there is one strength that makes this dictionary quite useful in its own way. Professor Wang provided sample sentences for most of the words (multiple sentences in some cases). And the sample sentences are written in both characters AND pinyin romanization with tones! So this dictionary is really a treasure-trove of sample sentences by a native speaker, arranged in dictionary format. There are other dictionaries that do this, but this is the most comprehensive set of sample sentences I have seen in a dictionary. (If you know of a better dictionary for this purpose, PLEASE let me know.)

On a personal note, I'm just kind of fond of this book. Like so many books that have been reprinted by Dover, this book is charmingly quirky, but we would have suffered a loss if it stayed out of print. The original work was published in 1967. It was obviously produced using an ordinary typewriter with the characters written in by hand (!). Don't worry: the calligraphy is painfully precise and clear. If you didn't know better, you might mistake it for a font. I'm old enough to remember when one couldn't do characters with a computer, so I appreciate how much work went into this volume. Finally, I feel an affectionate debt to people like Professor Wang, who taught the Chinese language back when only a handful of missionaries, linguists and government employees learned it. (Wang wrote a dictionary for the U.S. "War Department" in 1945 [p. v].)

So if you are a student of modern Chinese who is already equipped with one or more standard dictionaries, I recommend this book as an addition to your library.

A Chinese dictionary is no different than any other bilingual dictionary.
The words that seems to be out of order for an english speaker were ub actual phonetic, spelling order for the Chinese who might be searching for his multiple "syllable word" because he or she wanted an English translation.
The rooman alphabet is actually used correctly:
Jiu (= alcohol)
Jiu-jing (= grain alcohol},
jiu-jin-shan (= San Francisco),
jiu-jiu (= Maternal uncle),
jiu-liang (= ability to hold one's liquor).

The so-called syllables are actually individual words, each done with one character. These are spelled out in romanized text to make it clear to a new student that it is in alphabetical order even in Chinese. Each group of syllables create an ideogram, or better thought of as a "phrase," A Chinese person would recognize his or her phrase since the phrase indicates the idea presented. i.e. San Francisco is built on a Shan (mountain-side). The Jiu-Jin part is probably a long lost concept years ago after the first Chinese landed in San Francisco.

When the radicals are indexed, they are usually done in the number of strokes (or lines) it takes to create the character. It is not difficult to find the character desired by counting the strokes since most of them within the original "radical" are also created and noted as such, with the number of lines needed to make the character in the "radical" list.

Don't know the characters for the numbers, count the number of lines in the characters below the "number" and one learns quickly those basic numbers. It is a very helpful exercise in learning your way around the Chinese characters.

The four tones are easy to understand also. - / V and \, to further simplify the tones, they are numbered in roman numbes as: 1, 2 , 3, 4.
This numbers are usually written next to the romanized "characters".

If you are interested enough to learn Chinese any Chinese-English or
C-Spanish or C-German dictionary is an excellent place to start learning to recognize the components of each character.Mandarin Chinese Dictionary: Chinese-English

Had I been aware that there was no pronunciation guide for the entries in the dictionary, I wouldn't have wasted the money. I bought it for Chinese in-laws who are over for a visit so that they could learn to speak some English phrases. It was totally useless for this purpose.