Product Description

This dictionary is designed to help students understand, appreciate and remember Chinese characters. It has the following features: -Every character entry includes a brief traditional Chinese etymology. -Genealogical charts highlight the connections between characters, showing the creation of more than 4000 characters from less than 200 simple pictographs and ideographs. -Mandarin standards in China and Taiwan are distinguished. -Simplified forms for each character are given. -Character entries list all words which use the character in any position, allowing a word to be found even if the first character is unknown. -English definitions are referenced in an English-Chinese index. -A word pronunciation index allows students to directly search for an overheard word without having to guess the initial character. -A stroke count index lists every character by number of strokes.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #37395 in Books
• Published on: 1998-08-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 550 pages

From the Author
This dictionary is aimed at serious beginning students who want a more analytic approach to learning characters and at intermediate students who want to improve their understanding of characters. Students who are only interested in the spoken language should consider other dictionaries.

About the Author
Rick Harbaugh started the dictionary many years ago while a graduate student in economics at National Taiwan University. He now teaches economics at Indiana University's Kelley School of Business.

Customer Reviews

Unique. Very helpful. Not intended as etymologic.
If you want to learn the signs along their shape, take this book.
The book describes todays state of the signs, and their internal relations.

As somebody of the reviewers said: "this editor fell prey to the seductive charm of cute graphic stories"
Yes, and intentionally so. This book is for learning todays signs, gives relations and sometimes what is called "folk etymology", to make learning easier. If you are a sinologist, who wants to know how the signs developed diachronically, this book isn't for you. You dont need it in the first place, because you know all the signs already.

I hope this distinction: structure of todays signs vs hard core sinology & etymology is helpful.

Excellent tool
I'm studying chinese language for 2 years now, have some conventional dictionaries and use internet for help me learning. After several months of using [...] as my prefered online dictionary to get definitions, and character genealogy, I bought this excellent book that has very clever indexes to find the information using the sounds, character components, pinyin, english meaning, stroke count, radical, etc. It is a great help for learning. Great work !

Unique tool
A unique tool for searching chinese characters for foreign language students. It's easy to read. The book includes all the possible ways of looking for words: by English entries, by Chinese sounds, by stroke counting, by stroke order. The body of the dictionary is designed to illustrate how Chinese characters are actually constructed starting from radicals.