My New Best Friend: The Dictionary
February 4th, 2009 | View Comments
From the time I was very small, I knew that if my parents asked for the 漢英字典 (han4 ying1 zi4 dian3), they meant the battered teal green Chinese-English dictionary that was squirreled away in the cubby by the front door. It wasn’t until much, much later that I learned the 漢 part referred to the Chinese language. I knew that 英 meant English so you’d think it would’ve been obvious, but I guess not.
Well, I’m now the proud owner of my very own 漢英字典! Or rather, 漢英英漢字典. And none too soon, as I gave myself massive eyestrain staring at the stark white of Zhongwen.com, translating the cover of Grandma’s Crazy Phrasebook.
After much scouring on Amazon and asking Peter what he used in his college Chinese classes, I settled on this Chinese-English dictionary.
My requirements for a dictionary were:
- Must deal equally with traditional and simplified Chinese
- Must be able to look up by English, pinyin, radical, or stroke count
- If I look up English, I should get characters and pinyin. If I look up characters, I should get English and pinyin.
The first requirement turned out to be the hardest to manage, as many of the dictionaries I looked at (like the Langenscheidt one) seemed to deal primarily with simplified Chinese, which is the writing system they use on the mainland.
I want to be able to read simplified Chinese, as I want to read primary news sources from China, but I will be using traditional Chinese to communicate with my family in Taiwan.
My main concern about getting this particular dictionary was its physical size. Many, many of the negative reviews on Amazon complained the book was so small the writing was unreadable. Kind of a problem for a Chinese dictionary, as the individual characters tend to be a bit more complex than, y’know, the letter A. However, a careful reading of the reviews produced this useful tidbit: there is a large print edition of this dictionary (ISBN: 7-100-04358-1), which Amazon calls the “Library Binding” edition. I’d guess my “large print” edition uses about an 8pt font so you can imagine how readable the regular edition is.
I used the dictionary to compose an e-mail to my uncle and it pretty much did what I need a dictionary to do (assuming he doesn’t reply with 你說甚麼?—ni3 shuo1 shen2 mo5?—what did you say?).
I did notice a few instances of simplified Chinese that weren’t accompanied by the equivalent traditional Chinese, and a few of the phrases I was looking for weren’t in there. Whether that’s a matter of mainland colloquialisms/pronunciation vs. Taiwanese colloquialisms/pronunciation, or formal Chinese vs. informal Chinese, or dictionary only has Mandarin pronunciations vs. I didn’t realize this phrase I’ve always used is in the Taiwanese dialect, or dictionary has good Chinese vs. Yvonne has bad Chinese requires more exploration.
Yvonne posted this on February 4th, 2009 @ 12:13am in Books, Chinese | Permalink to "My New Best Friend: The Dictionary"
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American-born Taiwanese girl who married a Japanese guy. And who forgot about six years' of Spanish grammar and most of the vocab.
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