Customer Reviews

What Character Is That?: An Easy-access Dictionary of 5,000 Chinese Characters (Chinese and English Edition)

5 star:		(17)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This book tries to teach written chinese and provide a small reference dictionary. To an extent, it succeeds at both of these goals. But in my experience, it's not the best work out there to reach these goals.

Using a real chinese dictionary is not obvious to a beginning student. Think about it -- you can't exactly alphabetize chinese characters. This dictionary is actually no easier to use than a real dictionary, but it does offer explicit instructions on the organization, written for somebody who doesn't know chinese well. (I've seen dictionaries that only offer instructions in Chinese.)

It has a useful list of radicals (character building blocks), which is almost enough to justify the book. The dictionary is ordered by the english name of the radical. This is limitting and non-standard, and requires you have to remember this book's names of the radicals (e.g. is that filed under D for door or G for gate?)

That's about all the nice things I can say about this book. The non-dictionary part is poorly organized to the point that it's not clear what each page is supposed to be saying. Really poor typesetting compounds the problem. The dictionary is very small and incomplete. I can't imagine the memorization drills it offers helping anybody.

For somebody just starting to learn written chinese, I highly recommend _I Can Read That!_ (Sussman) instead to introduce basic concepts of written chinese. After that, a small book on radicals, a general language book that includes written chinese, or even a real dictionary should be accessible.

In my stuggles with the Chinese I have encountered many dictionaries and text books. This is probably the best comprehensive introduction to Chinese that I've seen. If you're going to China, taking Chinese classes or if you just want to read a Chinese menu, this probably will not be the last or most comprehensive book that you will want but it is the very first book that you must get! Reading it will make all future encounters with Chinese significantly demystified and much more user-friendly. Best of all, you will learn to navigate through a Chinese to English dictionary with ease. Buy it, and enjoy!

Too bad that this book cannot be rated to TEN stars. This book definitely proves that the concept of learning over 5,000 Chinese characters is in fact POSSIBLE. For anyone who thinks that learning all of those characters is impossible, BUY THIS BOOK. This book shows all of the necessary radicals, or "roots" of those characters-thoroughly, which is fundamental to learning Chinese characters. In addition to the radicals, each character is given it's pinjin pronounciation WITH it's definition. I am talking about over 5,000 characters here! Note that a Modern Chinese/English dictionary is also useful in learning to read Chinese text. Yet, if you want to learn how to read the fundamental 5,000+ Chinese characters, then this book is a good way to start.

This book seems almost too wonderful to be true. It starts by showing you the root and origin of 43 characters that are the key to unlocking over 4,000 charaters. It swiftly brings you from the "Ancient origins" to the "Traditional" to the "Simplified". The author has created several clever and enjoyable ways to understand and remember the Characters. It is really so much more than a dictionary... everyone studying Chinese should have one.... and put contact paper on it right away, because you will wear this book out.

This dictionary is a ¡°must¡± for all Americans who want to easily learn to read ,write and speak Chinese. To tour and work in mainland China, I needed a dictionary which would allow me, a non-native speaker, to read Chinese characters on maps, street signs, menus etc. I found all other ¡°Chinese to English¡± dictionaries at bookstores in the USA totally useless to me. Why? They were organized phonetically by Chinese words in alphabetical order. This meant I had to already know Chinese to find out what the character meant!
I was a Yale language major many years ago, joined the Foreign Service and taught English in Brazil. Several years ago, at age 64, I returned to my earlier profession and taught English in southern China. With the help of this extraordinary book, I was able to read and write letters in Chinese characters. It also helped me learn to speak Chinese at the basic level in both Mandarin and Cantonese dialects. I am now 66 years old and continue to learn. Recently I happily married a Chinese woman from Beijing who is only 50 years old. Without Mr.Go's books, I doubt that my new, great happiness in life would be possible.

This book is an excellent, step by step approach to the world of deciphering unknown Chinese characters. The best thing about this reference tool is that ANYONE can read its very understandable explanations and begin to search the meanings of Chinese characters. While this is not a dictionary in the traditional sense of the word, this "dictionary" is designed for the non-Native speaker and therefore alphabetizes Chinese radicals by their English names/meanings. To anyone familiar with Chinese Radicals, they are a fundamental part of learning the language and being able to become an independent learner/reader. This is an AWESOME first step resource in learning the concept, use and functionality of RADICALS. Once comfortable with the use of this "dictionary", one can confidently graduate into the labyrinth that is a real Chinese dictionary, as there are different modes of organizing dictionaries and often one finds one needs several varieties of dictionaries. Well worry not as this tool has the potential of exposing one to 5,000 characters.

What I especially like about this resource is the following: (1) It starts very slowly and proceeds step by step; (2) It has some easy to follow, confidence building quizzes at the beginning; (3) Its characters are in semi-large print that makes duplication easy to do; (4) It has **BOTH** Traditional & Simplified characters; (5) It also has multiple reference charts that makes finding characters quick and easy.

This book is such a must to any beginning or intermediate level student. I should know as I teach Chinese in a middle school and I found this book so useful that I ordered 2 class sets for my students. I had six graders busily looking up unknown characters after a couple days practice. Now, instead of continuously asking me what a character means, they grab one of the "dictionaries" and look up the character themselves. You have no idea what a difference in their confidence levels this has made!!!!

Trust me folks--save yourself alot of time and hassels, if you are at the beginning to intermediate level, this book is the ultimate primer for radicals and accessing unknown characters!

I keep learning from this book. I bought it 3 or 4 years ago and it is always with me at study time. With regular use you'll become familiar with the radicals used to write Chinese characters. You'll soon find it easy to look up unknown characters...you'll find them in half the time you'll need for a standard stroke counting dictionary. I often use this dictionary to find the pinyin and then go to the English /pinyin to find a whole word. For instance, if I found the word shoe polish and didn't recognize it, I would look under "rawhide" and find the word shoe. Then I could go to my pinyin dictionary and look up "xie" and find shoe polish. If a word is made up of several radicals, you'll soon confidently guess the dominant radical. This has also helped me remembering how to write the characters.

The dictionary also helps find odd characters such as "zhi/of" .

Having studied mostly traditional characters, I am now studying the part of the book that indexes simplified characters. This is just another grand component of this wonderful book. I don't use the rapid access index very often.

My only critique of this book is that I wish they had put the stroke numbers in the margins of the book so that they would be more visible. Otherwise, the book is a first rate gem!

I practically collect chinese dictionaries and books and this is the best book on the subject I own. It's the easiest dictionary to use for an english speaking person because it's alphabetically arranged around the *english* names of the radicals and words.

If I would have to keep only one of my books and dictionaries, I would keep this one and I wouldn't miss a thing.

This dictionary will not replace the need for some good regular dictionary, but in its own right - it is very useful. It may help you to find and learn characters that relate to specific character easily.

At the beginning of the book is a list of radicals.

The main characters are listed in alphabetical order under the name of that character in English, as in "arros", "ghost", "legs", etc.

Under the character for "arrow" are listed different chinese words that contain the character for "arrow".

Beside each Chinese character, there is pronounciation in pinyin as well as description of the meaning in English.

The words are listed from the smaller number of strokes toward the larger.

The presentation of the characters in this book provides yet another tool to memorize characters in respect to relevancy and association.

While this is considered to be a dictionary - I find it more useful just for learning different characters, rather than using the book as a dictionary. As far as dictionaries go, my all time favorite is Wenlin (electronic dictionary) since you can also hear the pronounciation.)

I was looking for a dictionary with maximum characters, and I found this one to be a great resource if you can pick out the character radical right away. It's much quicker than my other dictionary, and used in tandem with something like Oxford's Chinese Dictionary, it can cover all the bases of most characters you will encounter. My main need was a book that gave me less common characters used to transliterate foreign names and for characters that I couldn't find in my main dictionary. This book breaks down the radicals so simply that I think it makes them easier to learn as well. If you don't know the radical or can't easily identify it, I found I still needed the Oxford. As for the other reviewers who complained about the printing and the fact that it was self-published, I would recommend this book anyway because it doesn't look bad at all and the information is well worth the purchase.