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Chinese Characters: A Genealogy and Dictionary (English and Mandarin Chinese Edition)

by
Rick Harbaugh (Author)
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Rick Harbaugh (Author)
4.5 out of 5 stars 122 customer reviews
ISBN-13: 978-0966075007
ISBN-10: 0966075005
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Product Details

  • Paperback: 544 pages
  • Publisher: Yale University Press (September 1, 1999)
  • Language: English, Mandarin Chinese
  • ISBN-10: 0966075005
  • ISBN-13: 978-0966075007
  • Product Dimensions: 1 x 5.2 x 7 inches
  • Shipping Weight: 1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
  • Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (122 customer reviews)
  • Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #79,928 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Top Customer Reviews

5.0 out of 5 starsTerrific tool for learning and memorization!
By DocCaligari on April 21, 2003
Format: Paperback Verified Purchase
This is a review of _Chinese Characters: A Genealogy and Dictionary_ by Rick Harbaugh.
This is an excellent book for helping students to (1) learn and memorize Chinese characters, and (2) identify characters that are difficult to find in traditional dictionaries. However, as Harbaugh himself makes clear, it is important not to confuse this learning tool with a scholarly guide to the actual etymologies of Chinese characters.
In order to understand what is distinctive and especially useful about this dictionary, you need to know a little about how Chinese characters are composed. (If you already know this, or are not interested, skip to the next paragraph in this review.) Traditionally, there are five types of Chinese characters. The simplest characters are either pictograms (which were originally pictures of something concrete) or simple ideograms (whose structure suggests their meaning, even though they are not pictures). So, for example, the character for "person" was originally a drawing of a person, and the character for the number three is three horizontal lines. Many people assume that all Chinese characters fall into these two classes, but in fact only a small percentage do. Most Chinese characters are semantic-phonetic compounds, in which part of the character gives a hint about the sound, and another part gives a hint about the meaning. The last two types of characters are compound ideograms (in which two characters are compounded into one, and their individual meanings contribute to the meaning of the whole) and phonetic loans (in which a pre-existing character is borrowed to represent a word whose sound is similar to that of the word the character originally represented). Now, traditional dictionaries are organized according to over 200 so-called "radicals.Read more ›
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5.0 out of 5 starsFind a character with ease
By solid oak on March 15, 2002
Format: Paperback Verified Purchase
What a cleverly designed book!
-Search by pinyin (romanization)
-Search by bopomofo (zhuyinfuhao)
-Search the English word list
-Search by THE PART OF THE CHARACTER YOU RECOGNIZE (doesn't have to be the radical)
-Or, ok, search by stroke or radical
-Another way to search, not mentioned in other reviews or even in the intro to the book itself: search by looking for a character that goes with the target character (i.e. I have no idea what this character is, but I just saw it printed right after the word for water. Fine, I'll just look up water, and there's my mystery character). And the definitions show plenty of combinations as well. After all, what is a zi (character) by itself?
With this book, you will not be squinting through row after row of tiny characters as with, say, the Far East brand dictionary. You can find a word or combination in seconds, I promise.
Focuses on "traditional" characters, as used in Taiwan, Hong Kong, etc, the same characters that have been used for the last 2000 years. Also, includes simplified form in brackets, which have been used in Mainland China for 50 years.
If you don't care about written Chinese, and you just want to look up what you hear, then John DeFrancis' ABC Dictionary is surely the book for you. (It has simplified characters searchable by pinyin combinations).
If you love Chinese writing, and long to look up every word you see, but are tired of asking your friend to explain it to you,
then this book, 'Chinese Characters: A Genealogy and Dictionary
by Rick Harbaugh' is perfect.
One thing on the website which is missing from the book: reference numbers linking the character to Wieger's etymology, which (correctly or not) attempts to further explain a character's origins with samples of gu-wen (ancient writing).
Notice that this book currently takes 1-2 weeks to ship.
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4.0 out of 5 starsA great resource, but be forewarned
By A Customer on June 27, 2004
Format: Paperback
This dictionary isn't entirely historically accurate in its geneaologies. That said, whatever is does give you in terms of the root of the characters is often very easy to remember, and it does help you remember how to write the characters, if not what they look like. For practical reasons, it's very good in that sense.
Yes, it allows you to search for characters based on pin-yin, stroke count, some sort of Mandarin pronunciation system I've never heard of, English equivalents, or by radical. You can search for characters by the part of the character that you DO recognise; obviously this builds a lot of redundancy into the dictionary, which isn't a bad thing, but it doesn't always work that way, i.e. sometimes you recognise a component of a character and want to search for it, but it just isn't there. There are simply too many bases to cover, and though it generally works, it doesn't in all cases. Another thing, I find the radical index difficult to use until you're quite a ways into studying Chinese: for example, if I see the three-dots-of-water radical, and want to find it, I can't look under 3-stroke radicals, because this radical is, in fact, listed under 4-stroke radicals in the form of the water (shui3) character. Same thing with the 3-stroke grass radical, which is actually listed under the full 6-stroke grass. Sure, the radical, when alone, is written out in 6 strokes but as part of a character, it's liposuctioned down to 3, thus, you must get used to it, which isn't a big deal after you've studied for a while, but for beginners, it's tough.
The dictionary encompasses about 4000 characters, which is quite sufficient for most students, just not for people who are very advanced, but you may still find it interesting in that case anyways.Read more ›
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Most Recent Customer Reviews

4.0 out of 5 starsFour Stars

Very useful!

Published 11 days ago by Chiao Yu Liu
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Somebody doesn't understand how people actually acquire language skills. Here are a few reasons why the five star reviews must be from people who already speak Chinese. Read more

Published 2 months ago by Jason L
5.0 out of 5 starsFive Stars

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Published 3 months ago by Xiaoshu Liu
4.0 out of 5 starsA lot of missing characters if you want to translate ...

A lot of missing characters if you want to translate 8th century poetry, but very concise in its explanations of characters.

Published 9 months ago by Tomas Fletcher
5.0 out of 5 starsThis "dictionary" is amazing. You can look up characters in a huge ...

This "dictionary" is amazing. You can look up characters in a huge variety of ways and it feels really fast. I really like how it is organized.

Published 11 months ago by Hoelt Amarin
3.0 out of 5 starsOn the book is mentioned Used / Acceptable. For ...

On the book is mentioned Used / Acceptable.
For me is that right sufficient, but the English- Chinese index page 6-7 is a halve missing

Published 12 months ago by Dirk de Vogel
5.0 out of 5 starsFive Stars

Very interesting book

Published 13 months ago by Amazon Customer
5.0 out of 5 starsOutstanding Reference for Learners and Lovers of Chinese

I love this dictionary so much. It's not so much a standard Chinese to English dictionary as a reference that breaks down each character by its components and explains them. Read more

Published 17 months ago by Mitchell Conquer
5.0 out of 5 starsFive Stars

It is a excellent dictionary!

Published 18 months ago by Roberto Otsu
5.0 out of 5 starsWorth Every Penny

This is the best dictionary available for really understanding Chinese. The layout shows the morphology of each character giving it a "sticking" factor needed to master a... Read more

Published 21 months ago by Hitims

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