Comments on: The Chinese-Chinese dictionary survival guide

By: How Many Chinese Characters Do I Need To Learn? - Ninchanese

How Many Chinese Characters Do I Need To Learn? - Ninchanese — Tue, 24 May 2016 16:17:40 +0000

[…] if your goal is to be able to read a Chinese dictionary, which is a pretty advanced Chinese goal, then you’ll need to know at least 9,000 to 15,000 […]

By: Daniel

Daniel — Sun, 03 Nov 2013 18:14:12 +0000

I am a beginner, and I basically use two tools to look up Chinese words, both of them on my phone: To look up the Chinese translation for an English word, or to quickly check the tone of a Chinese word, I use Hanping Chinese Lite by Embermitre. Although this doesn’t offer the accuracy or thoroughness of a good paper dictionary, it is extremely easy to use and fully adequate for my current needs. If I encounter a Chinese word that I am not familiar with, I use the Google translation app, which lets me draw the character. At the moment, I only know about 100 radicals, so using a regular dictionary would be out of the question anyway. But considering how user-friendly the phone apps are, I do think that it will be quite some time before I would even consider using a more traditional dictionary, which currently seems extremely daunting.

By: nommoc

nommoc — Mon, 28 Oct 2013 00:15:12 +0000

I wish dictionaries gave more example sentences, classified characters as 褒义词，中性词，贬义词，listed opposites together, linked verbs and nouns together, and described what the word represents to a native speaker.

By: George

George — Fri, 29 Mar 2013 15:06:11 +0000

There are children’s Chinese-Chinese dictionaries are are much more pleasant to use and have lots of illustrations and clues that make things more helpful.

Since I am in Taiwan it is easy to get these resource and to start with materials for an elementary first grader and a work up.

Actually, this approach can be both fun and productive. It just might be that adult dictionaries are for people that have 12 years of education. I’ll never get 12 years of formal Chinese education.

By: Is your flashcard deck too big for your own good? | Hacking Chinese - 揭密中文

Is your flashcard deck too big for your own good? | Hacking Chinese - 揭密中文 — Wed, 27 Mar 2013 02:36:23 +0000

[…] that weren’t obvious, I added that bit of information as well. Later, when I started using Chinese-Chinese dictionaries, I added definitions in Chinese along with more etymology and other information I picked up along […]

By: Alexander McLeod

Alexander McLeod — Mon, 28 May 2012 23:54:59 +0000

Not exactly a dictionary, but an interesting take on this approach was Joel Bellassen’s 《说字解词》 published by 北京大学出版社(Beijing University). At the start of the book, a list of the 200 most common characters is provided, then a list of the 400 most common and finally a list of 900. Definitions of words in the dictionary are provided using only characters from each of those lists.

Example: Here are the definitions for 词

200 char definition: 一个名字是一个词。词有时是一个字，有时是两个、四五个字。
400 char definition: 1.中国文学的一种，可以唱。2.语言的一种成分，有一定的写法、意思和声音，人们用它来跟人说话，有时是一个字、两个字，有时世纪个字。
900 char definition: 语言里最小的可以自由运用的单位。

You can see that the limited number of characters available to use for the definition makes them a little tortuous at times, but the point is that the student is using Chinese to understand Chinese.

By: Olle Linge

Olle Linge — Sun, 23 Oct 2011 07:06:42 +0000

@Harland: “I don’t mean to say that you have to have so and so many words, I’m just saying that’s where I started…” It’s not to be either “step one” or a specific number. I merely included it as a reference. However, if you know 1000 words, using Chinese-Chinese dictionaries will be completely useless. 🙂

By: Harland

Harland — Sun, 23 Oct 2011 00:35:03 +0000

“Step 1: learn 9000 Chinese words”

Yeah, that’s a good idea. I’ll get right on that one.