Books
From MandarinWiki
Contents |
Schaum's Outlines: Chinese Grammar
Author: Claudia Ross
Review by: retroj
I highly recommend this book. It presents the topic of Chinese grammar in a clear and systematic way. I was particularly impressed with the chapter about the particles 了，着， and 过 because after reading it I had a clear understanding of how they operate in Chinese grammar. The different roles of characters with more than one grammatical function are treated separately and unambiguously. Same high praise for the other chapters I have read as well.
Chinese-English Frequency Dictionary
Author: Yong Ho
Review by: retroj
I get a lot of use out of this book. This is one book you can take with you anywhere, and when you have a free moment, open up to any page and you will learn something new. It is well-written and the examples are well chosen. It covers the 500 most common Chinese characters. For each character there is an explanation of the ways it is used and a list of one or two dozen words that begin with the character. The characters are in order by how common they are, and even though this relates directly to the selling point of the book, it is also my one complaint--looking up characters would be quicker if they were in pinyin alphabetical order. There is of course an index in the back.
ABC Chinese-English Comprehensive Dictionary
Editor: John DeFrancis
Review by: retroj
This is an excellent desk dictionary. It is Chinese-English meaning Chinese words with English definitions. It is rare to find a word not in this dictionary. The entries are in pinyin-alphabetical order, which has the advantage that looking up words is quick if you know the pronunciation, but not necessarily the characters. If you know the characters but not the pronunciation, there are radical and stroke-count charts in back. It is of course more work to look up characters with these charts, but you get used to it. This is not a very portable volume but it is far more complete than any portable dictionary I have seen. Personally I use this one at home and carry a smaller dictionary when I travel.
Chinese Characters: A Genealogy and Dictionary [ 中文字譜 ］
Author: Rick Harbaugh (Zhongwen.com)
Review by: Frazzydee
I found this extremely useful for learning characters. The information seems to be identical to that available at http://www.Zhongwen.com, but in paper form. Entries are ordered by the genealogy of the character, which, although not ideal for lookup purposes, really breaks down how the character evolved.
That being said, this is the last dictionary I would carry around with me in case I need to look up a word. Definitions are very terse, and I usually lookup the meaning in another dictionary if it's a new word. Check out the author's site; if you find it useful and could use a paper copy, this book will serve you well.
The book features a pinyin index, a radical index, and a stroke number index. You can also search for a character using a "component character, a character that shares a component part, or a character that is derived from the character." It is based on traditional characters, but also shows simplified characters where applicable.
Pocket Oxford Chinese Dictionary 英汉／汉英 Third Edition
Review by: retroj
This is an extensive travel-sized English-Chinese and Chinese-English dictionary. I have been generally happy with this dictionary and impressed with the quality of its definitions and its completeness vis-a-vis Chinese characters covered. However there are a couple of points on which it could do better. The main one is that pinyin is not given alongside Chinese example sentences. This limits the usefulness of the example sentences because you have to look up any word you don't know to get the pronunciation.
The Chinese-English half is in pinyin-alphabetical order by the first character of words. So you look up the first character of a word, and in a section about that character is a list of all the words that start with the character. This is occasionally helpful, because when you don't know how to pronounce the second or third character of a word, you have a relatively short list to look through. It can also be interesting to read through the whole section of a character and get a better idea of how that character is used in different words and contexts. On the whole though, I think I have a slight preference for simple pinyin-alphabetical order.
The character sections are headed in large type. It would be nice if they were in color, too, as in some other dictionaries. The word entries are in a somewhat strange font.
I hardly get any use out of the English-Chinese half of the book, so I think that if I were to look for another dictionary, I would prefer one that was just Chinese-English. That would also make it practical for such a dictionary to include pinyin pronunciations for the example sentences.
This dictionary has a good radical index, but no stroke index. There have been rare occasions when I wished it had a stroke index.
