Chinese dictionary
February 3, 2006 11:03 AM   Subscribe

Last night I was watching the completely superb "China Rises" documentary. In one scene a mother helps her son with his homework, the kids doesn't know the meaning of a word, mom says get the dictionary. Shot of dictionary, duh, it's in Chinese. How does a Chinese dictionary work? How do you find the character you're looking for?
posted by Keith Talent to Writing & Language (8 answers total) 1 user marked this as a favorite
 
There's a good description here; short answer: it ain't easy, but with practise you can get pretty good at it even if you don't really know the language.
posted by languagehat at 11:12 AM on February 3, 2006


It's VERY complicated. Each chinese character is consisted of individual "simple" components. Usually,

1. You can take the top left component,
2. figure out how many brush strokes it takes to write it (let's say it's 5)
3. Look it up under "5 strokes," find the exact character

Then you flip to the section to where all those characters containing the simple character are. They will be listed by number of strokes, smallest to biggest.

It's painstaking process, because when you're in elementary school, sometimes it's hard to tell which one is the simple character.
posted by Sallysings at 11:16 AM on February 3, 2006


this page has some methods listed for looking up kanji (the japanese characters borrowed from chinese) on the internet using numerical descriptive systems. you can scroll up to see non-descriptive indices of characters. it's just sort of neat how many different ways there are to do this stuff.
posted by soma lkzx at 11:18 AM on February 3, 2006


To clarify my other post...let's take this character:
"yun" or person as a simple component, with two strokes, all characters containing it would this list.

The component is listed under the column "bushou"

Notice how it could be in weird places in the complete character: on the bottom of page one, it's stretched out across the top.

Other simple components (bushou) that used to confuse me as a child was the character "knife" It's written like this , and it sits on the right side of characters.
posted by Sallysings at 11:22 AM on February 3, 2006


Most Chinese characters are compound, and have a smaller part called the "radical" -- 'often' it's the narrow bit on the left and a valid character in itself. Traditional dictionaries have a list of the radicals in groups by their stroke count, and then for each radical it has a list of complete characters using that radical, indexed again by stroke count of the whole character. I don't know how they resolve stroke count ties.
posted by fleacircus at 11:27 AM on February 3, 2006


Here, an online version to play with. You can also get some translations for input from here.
posted by kcm at 12:15 PM on February 3, 2006


oh and good luck figuring out kou v. wei (both boxes), or tu v. shi v. gong when they all have other strokes in them. :)

I read, write and speak it (them) like a preschooler so I feel your pain.
posted by kcm at 12:25 PM on February 3, 2006


Assuming you are asking about how to use a Chinese dictionary in modern China (mainland).

There are two approaches:
1. If you know what the word sounds like: modern Chinese uses pin-yin (a form of romanization) to sound out words. However, in Chinese, unlike English, there are lots of homonyms even under one sound, one tone. Thus, you can flip open a dictionary, which is ordered alphabetically, and find your word under the letter and tone.

example: I want to know how to write horse, "ma (third tone)". I would open the dictionary to "m", "a", third tone, and scan through the definitions till I find the word. (More often than not, we have a sense of what the word looks like, so it's a bit faster than scanning through all the definitions.)

2. If you do not know how to pronounce a character, there is a special section divided into three subdivisions in the front of the dictionary:
a. look up the radical in the first subdivision, which directs you to another page in the 2nd subdivision. This section is ordered by the number of strokes in the radical.

Principle upon which this is based: the majority of Chinese characters can be broken up into a radical and another component (FYI one side helps with sound and the other helps with meaning). This radical can be the part on the top, bottom, left or right side of the character. We are taught to recognize these when we are in 1st and/or 2nd grade (I went up to 3rd grade in China and then came to the US).

b. in the second subdivision, you will find a column headed by your radical. Underneath are all words containing that radical ordered by the number of strokes. So you count out the strokes in your character and find it in the column. A page number will be listed next to the character, and voila! Follow the page number to the listing in the dictionary.

c. The 3rd subdivision lists characters with no radicals, or radicals that are hard to discern. They are once again listed by number of strokes, with a page number to the main dictionary next to the character.

The second method sounds complicated. However, it generally only takes about 1 minute or 2 to find the character, and most of the time spent on page flipping. Nowdays, there are electronic dictionaries that allow the user to write the word and automatically recognizes it and gives you options to select which word you want. From there, the dictionary will pronounce it for you. But alas, I am too poor to afford one. =)

Regarding issues raised by other posters:
1. fleacircus "stroke count ties": there are a TON of those. They are just all listed under that number of strokes. You find it by scanning through them, which really isn't all that much work.
2. kcm: I know what you are talking about. However, the print type for these are different (kou vs. wei). In addition, the length of strokes are important too (tu vs. shi). Also when looking up radicals, it will tell you in paratheses if the radical is on top/bottom, left/right so you can search accordingly.
posted by state fxn at 8:57 PM on February 3, 2006


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