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How to search words in a Chinese dictionary

 

While having a break during the morning lessons, I saw many of the Mandarin Chinese language students trying to find in a dictionary the new characters that we have just studied. After some minutes struggling, they came to ask me the different ways to search for a word in a Chinese dictionary. And, of course, you can guess this is the topic in today’s blog.

 

As we all know, English dictionaries (similarly to other European languages) take advantage of the alphabetical order of the Roman letters to organize the words. However, in Chinese language, which lacks of letters, the task of organizing words in the dictionaries has to be worked out in a different way.

 

Many of the students in our London school have learned Pinyin, so it is not difficult for them to search Chinese characters in the dictionary using Roman letters. This is the most straightforward and easy way to search for words in a Chinese dictionary. Nevertheless, what is challenging not only for them, but for anyone beginning to study Mandarin Chinese is to search the characters by the number of strokes and the radical part of them. These two are then, the most common ways for anyone who wishes to search for a Chinese character of unknown pronunciation. However, it requires to know the rules for writing characters in the correct way.

 

Most of the modern Chinese dictionaries, offer the three ways described above to search for words. So, it is up to the user to employ the procedure that is more suitable for him/her. There are myriad of dictionaries in China, many of them general and some specific to certain fields of science and humanities.

 

Among the most popular general dictionaries in China we can recommend the New Chinese Dictionary and Morden Chinese Dictionary. New Chinese Dictionary is also called Xinhua Zidian. It is a pocketsize dictionary which is very portable and easy to take. It contains exclusively single-characters (words composed by only one character) together with their meaning, pronunciation and tone. In total, it has around eight thousand entries, which is close to what is believed to be the total number of accepted Chinese characters.

 

However, if you want to use one that additionally includes words composed by more than one character, then Morden Chinese Dictionary (Xiandai Hanyu Cidian in Pinyin) is a good choice. It is a medium-sized book and covers over fifty-six thousand entries. Besides the content that offers the previous dictionary, this one also includes set phrases and Chinese idioms. Nevertheless, these two dictionaries are convenient for students who have certain level in Mandarin Chinese language.

 

In conclusion, searching for words in a Chinese dictionary can be a daunting task. With a little of knowledge of this language and the rules for writing characters, taming a Chinese dictionary can be achieved by anyone. At first4mandarin, the Mandarin Chinese language school in London we help our students to learn how to use the two dictionaries presented in this blog or any of those designed especially for foreign students who want to learn Mandarin Chinese.

 

3 Responses so far.

  1. Rob says:

    Hi there,

    I think this is a very interesting post. When I try to search for a word in an on-line or electronic dictionary and I don’t know the pinyin of the word, is this number-of-strokes method the one I need to follow to find the word? If this is the case, then I need to have some knowledge of the language, isn’t it?

    Regards,

    Rob

    • Yolanda Luo says:

      Hi Rob,

      Thank you for your comment.

      Using Pinyin is the fastest way to find the characters you want on-line and with electronic dictionaries, because you just need to know how to pronounce them, and then type the Roman letters to find them.
      Some on-line and electronic dictionaries also provide another way to find your target characters, which is handwriting. If you have the character, but you don’t know neither how to pronounce it nor its meaning, you can draw the character, and then you can select the one which is similar to what you drew to find the correct character. The link below is the one I always use in my lessons for my students, you can have a try:

      http://hanzi.unihan.com.cn/School/HSK/

      The number-of-strokes method is only used in the dictionaries (in a book format) and not in the electronic or on-line dictionaries.

      Of course you need to have some knowledge of Mandarin Chinese Language to use Chinese dictionaries not only in book format, but also on-line and in electronic format. I hope my answer can be helpful for you, and if you have more questions, please feel free to leave a comment or come to our school first4mandarin to ask.

      Have a nice day!

      Yolanda Luo

  2. Rob says:

    Hi Yolanda,

    Thank you for your answer! It’s very kind from you to share how to search for words in a Chinese dictionary whatever its format.

    Rob

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