- Chinese students are taught about 5,000 characters, or han4zi4 汉字, just to be able to read newspapers.
- The characters are not phonetic, although part of many characters may hint at some degree of similarity with the pronunciation of other characters containing that part. Their pronunciation is not easily accesible to the uninitiated. This renders most dictionaries for natives barely usable by non-Chinese. Even when the pronunciation is shown for the headword, any examples are almost always left untransliterated.
- While some dictionaries are arranged more or less in phonetic order, more are arranged by a traditional system based on part of the character called the the radical (bu4shou3 部首) which is used to classify characters plus the number of additional or total strokes to write the character. Even most of those that appear to be phonetic in order, alphabetize by the pronunciation of one character at a time, usually listing all those having a particular pronunciation and the first tone before those of the same pronunciation and the second (3rd, 4th, or neutral) tone. The traditional system puts puts all words beginning with a particular character together, but these character by character phonetic systems can place words beginning with the same character but having a different tone or different pronunciation altogether in different parts of the dictionary. While total or partial grouping together by beginning character is helpful for learning related words, it makes rapid lookup of words very difficult. For rapid lookup I therefore prefer the strictly alphabetical order of the Langenscheidt Chinese-English Dictionary or another version of it put out by Berlitz. While the glossaries at the back of most phrasebooks are also strictly alphabetical, many lack Chinese characters, and the number of items tends to be quite limited. You have to know the range of "quirks" of the dictionaries you use. Each has it advantages or disadvantages for certain tasks.
- Trying to figure out in a traditionally organized dictionary which part of a character is the radical (bu4shou3 部首) used to classify the character you don't even know the pronunciation of, never mind the meaning, can be extremely frustrating. Usually the classifying radical is on the top, the left, or partially or totally surrounds the rest.
- The majority of Chinese characters today fall into the category of semantic-phonetic logical aggregates, combining a radical, or component, that provides a general semantic category for the word with a radical that provides a clue to the general pronunciation of the characater. Traditional dictionaries classify these characters under the semantic component, but Zhong1wen2 Zi4pu3 中文字譜 (Chinese Characters: A Geneology and Dictionary) by Rick Harbaugh classifies characters according to the phonetic component, putting together that share this component and generally, but not always have a similar or somewhat similar pronunciation. Students of Chinese often find that it is very easy to confuse such characters, and it can therefore be extremely helpful to see these characters grouped together.
- Particularly good dictionaries may also refer you not only to alternate pronunciations of a character, but also to words containing but not beginning with the word. Software and online dictionaries are particularly good at this, and a hot link may save the tedium of a second round of looking up.
- Another point of difficulty is whether a dictionary's main entries and example phrases are shown just in traditional characters still used in Taiwan and many places outside China or in the simplified forms used for many but not all characters in the People's Republic, or both. Because I like to see both, I prefer dictionaries like the Oxford Concise CE-EC Dictionary. However I must point out that Japan has also simplified characters, though not so many as in China, and more importantly, not always in the same or even in a similar way! Modern Korean has largely eliminated the use of Chinese Characters (hanja) in favor of a native phonetic system (hangeul), but traditional Korean is written in a combination of Chinese characters and phonetically written inflections and particles, in a manner very similar to that still used to write Japanese.
- Students learning more than one East Asian language must learn not only the different written forms of characters used in each language, but also the different pronunciations. In Mandarin Chinese, each character typically has only one pronuciation (though some do have alternate tones or pronunciations). In Japanese and Korean, each character typically has at least two types of pronunciation, first a Sino-Japanese or Sino-Korean pronunciation related historically to a Chinese pronunciation associated with the character at one or more times when uses of the character were brought to each country from China, and secondly one or more native pronunciations of words or morphemes whose meanings are linked with that/those of the character.
- Beyond this, although when I refer to Chinese here I am mostly referring to Mandarin, known as pu3tong1hua4 普通话 in the PRC and as guo2yu3 国语 in Taiwan, Chinese is not just one language, but a family of languages at least as different as those of Europe, though usually referred to as dialects. Words and the pronunciation of characters may therefore differ considerably in each "dialect." Mandarin has for example has lost all final consonants expcept for "n" and "ng," but this is not true of many of the dialects, nor is it true of Sino-Korean, Sino-Japanese, or Sino-Vietnamese pronunciations of characters and words. The preservation of many such older features in these has been of great value to scholars in the reconstruction of older forms of Chinese, as have the phonetic or "rime" components of characters.
Dictionaries' ease of use can make or break the language learning experience for any language, but particularly for Chinese.
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