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Technology Information:

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

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.

Reviews

Rating: 5 / 5
Date: 2010-08-22
Summary: "An Essential Reference Book!"

Nearly 10 years after I bought this Character Geneology from Amazon, my copy is only moderately dog eared. That's surprising, because it has been one of the most needful books I own, dragged from Europe to Asia, from city to mountain and suburbs between. The pages, I've found, are stout travel-book quality, with a good hardy softback cover. They've held my section tabs and bookmarks very well over the years.

If you want to know HOW the writen Chinese language works, you MUST have this text. There is an inherent logic, a poetry, to Chinese characters. It's not a random "ideographic" system. There is method and illuminating order. Learning with regular dictionaries, you may eventually begin to intuitively pick that up. This is indeed the classical way of learning Chinese literacy, by inference and caligraphic study.

But this Zipu book makes many of the inherent links between characters clear using etymological cladistics. It's thus much more easy to see the shifts and affinities between characters. Quite quickly, you'll begin to read Chinese and say, "Aha!" Amongst the transgramatical meanings that characters suggest, the etymological stories you've learned, you'll begin to grasp a whole Weltanschauung, a world view.

For average learners, the Zhongwen Zipu will jump start your reading and writing capabilities. Need Chinese for business? Get this book.

For academics, literati, as well as religious and artistic aspirants, this book will deepen and broaden your appreciation for the world's semiotically richest and most illuminating writing system. Thus, as in any gongfu, it will enrich you.

Check out the accompanying website for easy, free online lookup. My only complaint is that there is not yet a downloadable version, and an ipod ap for this book.

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Rating: 4 / 5
Date: 2010-04-11
Summary: "Zhongwen Zipu"

I've used this dictionary for about eight months now. This dictionary doesn't have every single Chinese character in it, but it has enough so that it's useful as a reading companion. This dictionary and a more comprehensive dictionary together would be ideal.

After using this dictionary, I'm of the opinion that every Chinese dictionary should be organized with zi4pu3 (genealogical tables). One nice thing is that you can look up a character without knowing how it's pronounced or what its radical is. It's usually not too hard to find a character, but every once in a while (especially as a beginner) you'll come across an elusive one. However, if you already know the pronunciation of the character, it's quite easy to find.

There are four ways to use this dictionary to find a character, which I'll rank from quickest to slowest: (1)by pronunciation, (2)by radical, (3)by the genealogical tables, and (4)by the number of strokes. Hopefully you never have to use (4).

This dictionary is organized using traditional characters. Since traditional characters are usually closely related to their simplified versions, using this dictionary is acceptable for those of us who wish to learn Pu3tong1hua4 (mainland Mandarin). The simplified versions of all the characters are written in the entries.

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Rating: 5 / 5
Date: 2010-04-07
Summary: "Best Chinese dictionary on the market, you'll need no other!"

Ok so my son is in a chinese speaking area outside of the USA and even though he had 2 years of High School chinese and one semster of college chinese he still needed a GREAT dictionary! After buying several... I have a shelf full!!!!! This was by far the only one he needed.. it's user friendly and has all the tone marks! Once we finally found this GREAT one all the others became obsolete, wish we had found this one first!

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Rating: 2 / 5
Date: 2010-03-08
Summary: "Often inaccurate, some far-fetched, Not good for beginners or young kids"

I took out 3 stars because: 1) Of more than 5000 characters in use, this genealogy only lays out perhaps 1000 pictographic explanations, most for traditional form of characters. The rest are simply and often incorrectly treated as pictophonetic characters (i.e., with one element indicating meaning and the other sound). 2) Many translations are close but inaccurate and some explanations are far-fetched. 3) Compared with other mnemonic tools, such as Hoenig's 2178 mnemonics or geniusChinese 5467 mnemonics, this one may be too technical for beginners or young learners.

Two stars are given for its very good price (even free at its website) and excellent presentation of the genealogy.

Although I only gave 2 stars, I still use it sometimes. The author did an excellent job at his time.

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Rating: 5 / 5
Date: 2009-11-17
Summary: "My favorite Chinese dictionary"

Like most people who have studied Chinese for any length of time, I A) own several dictionaries of Chinese, and B) still don't know many, many of the characters and words. Therefore it means a lot when I say that this is my favorite dictionary. I carried it almost everywhere when I lived in Taiwan and thumbed through it constantly.

For a full preview see the website [...] which is essentially the on-line version of this dictionary.

Other points to consider, first this is keyed to the traditional characters, and not the simplified. Therefore be a bit careful about purchase if you wish to study the simplified characters.

Secondly, although if I could only have one dictionary with me, this would be it, I did use it in conjunction with a few other dictionaries when translating written texts. (IIRC, this one has about 5000 characters and many words. I have a different one which, I think, contains 8,000 characters and more words. I also used a chengyu. idiom dictionary.)

No single volume can be the perfect Chinese language dictionary. The language is just too complex. However, if I could only have one, then this would be the one I would choose.