11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
wonderful survival tool, April 16, 2004
By A Customer
This review is from: The Oxford Chinese Minidictionary (Paperback)
I purchased this dictionary prior to a two-week stay in Taiwan. I used it 10 to 30 times a day in a wide variety of situations - mostly to look up vocabulary words in the English-Chinese section, but also on several occasions to decipher what people were saying to me in the Chinese-English section. The pinyin is clear and the examples were great.
As one of the reviewers above noted, some of the words I looked up were absent, but this only happened a few times and in most cases I was able to find a suitable synonym. I spent over an hour comparing dictionaries in the bookstore, and found this to be true of ALL of the pocket dictionaries I looked at.
On several occastions people I was speaking with were so impressed with my ability to 'unstick' conversations (and look up words alphabetically by pinyin) with this dictionarry that they would invariably ask to take a look at it and spend some time browsing and discussing it themselves.
It is also the only one of the pocket dictionaries which I was able to actually get into my pocket, or hold unobtrusively in one hand while I walked around the city.
The dictionary also includes a simple character/radical lookup chart, which I was actually able to use to look up some written characters I encountered (though this can take several minutes per character).
The dictionary is intentionally non-symmetrical; the Chinese-English side contains words and concepts you are likely to encounter, and the English-Chinese side contains words and concepts you are likely to want to express. For example, whereas the Chinese side has more words to express things like politeness and family relationships, the English side has more words for more Western things like skydiving and mowing the lawn.
This might not be the right dictionary for someone translating a Chinese newspaper, but for a 1st-year Mandarin student trying to survive in Taiwan this dictionary was invaluable.
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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
An invaluable resource, December 14, 2007
This review is from: The Oxford Chinese Minidictionary (Paperback)
This dictionary has its niche ... and it fits me perfectly. I've worked in China for the past two and a half years and this dictionary has been my constant companion. I use it for daily activities (store, post office, bike repair) and it has never let me down. It is also far more compact than any of the other dictionaries belonging to my friends.
The reason I gave this dictionary 5 stars is because it possesses something which no other dictionary has (even others in the Oxford series) : whole phrases that are written in english, pinyin, and characters. When you look up an English word in most other pocket dictionaries they may provide you with a one word chinese equivalent in characters and pinyin. Some of the better ones will even give you an example phrases which shows how the word is used correctly. But here's the problem ... that example phrase is almost always given in Chinese characters. This dictionary gives you an example phrase in pinyin and characters!
Of course this is not the dictionary for you if you want to translate an official paper or engage in advanced chinese studies, but if you are going to live in-country and begin picking up the language on your own then this dictionary is an invaluable resource because it provides you with beautiful examples of word-usage without requiring you to read 100's of characters. It's like a mini-textbook. Nothing else touches it.
As a testament to how helpful this mini-dictionary really is: after seeing how amazing my dictionary was, three separate co-workers of mine gave up using their previous dictionaries and ordered their own copies of the Oxford Chinese mini-dictionary.
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
A useful companion, May 15, 2010
This review is from: The Oxford Chinese Minidictionary (Paperback)
This little dictionary has many everyday words in it. I have a problem finding words in the Chinese-English section, because the words are listed in some strange manner that relates to the Chinese characters. These are incomprehensible to a beginner and the same pinyin word with the same tones sometimes appears in more than one place. I have also given up trying to find a word on more than one occasion, only to find it later. I think this is a serious shortcoming. The beginner, like me, who really needs this dictionary will usually be stuck on pinyin and it's usefulness is compromised by this technicality.
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