Choosing the right Chinese English Dictionary

Choosing the right Chinese English dictionary is a lot harder than, say, buying a French/English dictionary, which you can probably do it almost effortlessly.

Following a survey of all the major dictionaries available in the market, we have to conclude that the “must have”, hands-down winner has not been published yet. This is because, in our humble opinion, the ideal dictionary for a modern student of the Chinese language must have the following attributes:

• Lists both traditional and simplified Chinese characters.

Many college-level Chinese language courses expect students to learn both sets of chinese characters for very practical reasons. Unless you expect to live only in the PRC, you will need to be able to read traditional chinese characters, which are still widely used  in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and all overseas Chinese communities. Even in the PRC, traditional chinese characters are making a comeback in some places, such as restaurant signboards. Conversely, in Taiwan and Hong Kong, writers often use some simplified chinese characters when writing them by hand.

• Uses pinyin as the primary system for representing word pronunciation.

This is generally the case today except for most dictionaries published in Taiwan, which typically use the zhuyin (bopomofo) method.

• It’s possible to find a Chinese word by its pronunciation.

If you hear a word during a conversation and want to look it up, it will be important to be able to look it up by its pronunciation, which generally means that you need a dictionary where words are ordered according to their pinyin spellings.

• It’s possible to find a Chinese character without knowing how it’s pronounced.

If you find a character you don’t recognize while reading a book, you obviously won’t know how it should be pronounced and you’ll need to find the character in the traditional way, by determining the character’s main radical and number of strokes, an admittedly painful process.

• Both the Chinese characters and pinyin are shown in the English-to-Chinese translation.