Dictionaries

Chinese Dictionaries   With the advent of electronic and online dictionaries, the process of looking up characters and words has become considerably easier. Given an online dictionary like http://www.nciku.com/, all you have to do is enter the pinyin. If you do not know the pinyin, you can simply use your cursor to draw the character and the site will return a list of similar characters. Many tablet and phone based dictionaries, like Pleco, work in much the same way.

Chinese dictionaries are traditionally arranged in various ways but, regardless of how any given dictionary is laid out, there are several ways to look up characters. You can look up a character based on its pronunciation, its radical or its stroke count.

Radical Every character has one of 214 radicals as part of it (180 in the simplified set). If you recognize the radical, dictionaries have an index of radicals. Under each radical is a list, by number of strokes, of all the characters with the given radical.

Pronunciation If you know the pronunciation of a character, you can look it up under the pronunciation, though you will still have to find the character amongst all the characters that share that pronunciation. Many dictionaries today are arranged by pronunciation,or of not will have an index by pronunciation.

Stroke Count If you do not know the pronunciation and cannot recognize the radical, you can look up the character by the number of strokes. Once you count the strokes, you will find the character in the stroke count index, though here again you will still have to find the character amongst all the characters with the same number of strokes.

Note that to look up a multi-character term, you first find the first character, then look for that term.

*With the advent of electronic dictionaries, including online websites, you can now draw a character in order to look it up. Despite this, it is still advisable to e able to look up characters in the traditional manner.

Example

For this example, we are going to use the online Chinese dictionary found at [|www.zhongwen.com]. This is a wonderful dictionary because you can click on any character and it will take you to the definition, which includes both derivation and meaning. Note however that you can only look up traditional characters.

Once you get to the site, you will see a section called Search Dictionary in the middle left section of the screen. There are several different methods of looking up characters, as below:

Search Dictionary <span style="font-family: Georgia,serif; font-size: 120%;">[|Pronunciation] <span style="font-family: Georgia,serif; font-size: 120%;">[|Radical] <span style="font-family: Georgia,serif; font-size: 120%;">[|Stroke Count]

<span style="font-family: Georgia,serif; font-size: 120%;">As discussed above, these are the three ways of looking up Chinese characters. Try the following exercises in order to learn how to use the dictionary. The answers are at the bottom.

<span style="font-family: Georgia,serif; font-size: 120%;">1) Pronunciation <span style="font-family: Georgia,serif; font-size: 120%;">If you look under the Pronunciation link, you will see a list of all the possible pronunciations. Try finding the character 甭using this link. It is pronounced beng. Note down the derivation - given first - and the meaning.

<span style="font-family: Georgia,serif; font-size: 120%;">2) Radical <span style="font-family: Georgia,serif; font-size: 120%;">Now let's try using the radical link. Here you will find a list of all the Chinese radicals. Every Chinese character has one and only one radical. To find a character using the radical, first identify the radical. Then count how many strokes there are in the character above and beyond the number in the radical. Find the radical in the list, and go to the number of additional strokes. <span style="font-family: Georgia,serif; font-size: 120%;">Try this method to look up the characters 修, 湖, and 珠.

<span style="font-family: Georgia,serif; font-size: 120%;">3) Stroke count <span style="font-family: Georgia,serif; font-size: 120%;">Sometimes you may not recognize the radical, and you do not know the pronunciation. In that case, the only thing left to do is count the number of strokes in the character and troll through a list of characters with that number of strokes. <span style="font-family: Georgia,serif; font-size: 120%;">Count the number of strokes in the character 茶 . Now click on the Stroke count link and go to the number you found. Look through the list until you find the character.

<span style="font-family: Georgia,serif; font-size: 120%;">Dictionary Answers Click here to see the answers to the exercise.