Chinese Characters: A Genealogy and Dictionary

By: Harbaugh, Richmond

Book Overview

This dictionary is specially designed to help students understand, appreciate and remember Chinese characters. It has the following features: Each character entry includes a brief etymology explaining... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0966075005
• ISBN13: 9780966075007
• Release Date: September 1999
• Publisher: Yale University Press
• Length: 544 Pages
• Weight: 1.16 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.4" x 5.1" x 7.1"

Customer Reviews

The swiss army knife of Chinese character dictionaries.

You'll might need several dictionaries to be comfortable learning Chinese. This simultaneously phonetic and semantic-based dictionary and character genealogy is too unique not to be in your repertoire. Not only can you search by stroke, radical, pinyin, or English spelling, but also by looking for the part of the character you do regognize and going from there, or by pronounciation, or by bopomofo. Its format is perfect for learning characters and their roots. Presented are 182 root ideographs from which 4000 other characters are derived. Find the character for horse ("ma") and you'll find associated terms which contain that character (e.g. saddle) as well as homophones which have nothing to do with horses but sound somewhat similar to "ma" (e.g. jade, scold, mom). Very well done.

Terrific tool for learning and memorization!

This is a review of _Chinese Characters: A Genealogy and Dictionary_ by Rick Harbaugh.This is an excellent book for helping students to (1) learn and memorize Chinese characters, and (2) identify characters that are difficult to find in traditional dictionaries. However, as Harbaugh himself makes clear, it is important not to confuse this learning tool with a scholarly guide to the actual etymologies of Chinese characters. In order to understand what is distinctive and especially useful about this dictionary, you need to know a little about how Chinese characters are composed. (If you already know this, or are not interested, skip to the next paragraph in this review.) Traditionally, there are five types of Chinese characters. The simplest characters are either pictograms (which were originally pictures of something concrete) or simple ideograms (whose structure suggests their meaning, even though they are not pictures). So, for example, the character for "person" was originally a drawing of a person, and the character for the number three is three horizontal lines. Many people assume that all Chinese characters fall into these two classes, but in fact only a small percentage do. Most Chinese characters are semantic-phonetic compounds, in which part of the character gives a hint about the sound, and another part gives a hint about the meaning. The last two types of characters are compound ideograms (in which two characters are compounded into one, and their individual meanings contribute to the meaning of the whole) and phonetic loans (in which a pre-existing character is borrowed to represent a word whose sound is similar to that of the word the character originally represented). Now, traditional dictionaries are organized according to over 200 so-called "radicals." Every character in Chinese has at least one radical in it somewhere. So if you want to identify a Chinese character you haven't seen before (or can't remember), you take an educated guess at what the radical in it is, then look for it under that radical in the dictionary. However, one problem is that the radicals of some characters are not obvious. What Harbaugh has done is to organize his dictionary around 182 pictograms and simple ideograms. (Many of these overlap with the traditional radicals, but others do not.) Then he shows (using extensive "genealogical" charts) how about 4000 other characters are built up from the original 182 by adding more components. Part of what makes this book really useful is that Harbaugh builds the charts in a way that highlights the phonetic components of characters. For example, his basic character 175 is identified as a "pictograph of [the] interlocking framework of a house." This character is pronounced GOU, and underneath it in Harbaugh's dictionary you will find four characters with very similar pronunciations (and one with a different pronunciation) that include that character as a component. In contrast, in a traditional di

Find a character with ease

What a cleverly designed book! -Search by pinyin (romanization)-Search by bopomofo (zhuyinfuhao)-Search the English word list-Search by THE PART OF THE CHARACTER YOU RECOGNIZE (doesn't have to be the radical)-Or, ok, search by stroke or radical-Another way to search, not mentioned in other reviews or even in the intro to the book itself: search by looking for a character that goes with the target character (i.e. I have no idea what this character is, but I just saw it printed right after the word for water. Fine, I'll just look up water, and there's my mystery character). And the definitions show plenty of combinations as well. After all, what is a zi (character) by itself?With this book, you will not be squinting through row after row of tiny characters as with, say, the Far East brand dictionary. You can find a word or combination in seconds, I promise.Focuses on "traditional" characters, as used in Taiwan, Hong Kong, etc, the same characters that have been used for the last 2000 years. Also, includes simplified form in brackets, which have been used in Mainland China for 50 years.If you don't care about written Chinese, and you just want to look up what you hear, then John DeFrancis' ABC Dictionary is surely the book for you. (It has simplified characters searchable by pinyin combinations).If you love Chinese writing, and long to look up every word you see, but are tired of asking your friend to explain it to you, then this book, 'Chinese Characters: A Genealogy and Dictionaryby Rick Harbaugh' is perfect.One thing on the website which is missing from the book: reference numbers linking the character to Wieger's etymology, which (correctly or not) attempts to further explain a character's origins with samples of gu-wen (ancient writing).Notice that this book currently takes 1-2 weeks to ship.

Chinese characters can be fun

This review is long overdue. My copy of Chinese Characters: A Genealogy and Dictionary is already becoming worn with use. It has rapidly become one of my favorite books.Although it may not contain the greatest number of entries, this is inevitably the Chinese dictionary I turn to first, simply because it is so well designed, convenient and miraculously cross-referenced. Any student of Chinese knows that dictionary look-up can be a grave pain: none of the standard look-up methods is very reliable or fast, and many of the best, most complete and authoritative dictionaries are arranged in such a way that use is difficult unless one already knows a host of characters.Rick Harbaugh has taken the wild garden of Chinese characters and made it an enjoyable, fun place for study or sheer wandering. One of the other reviewers here pointedly questions the value and/or accuracy of many of Harbaugh's "etymologies" -- while I am nowhere near linguist enough to refute this reader's claims or otherwise argue with him/her, I guess my response (or question) would be "what does it matter? If the book helps a learner memorize and appreciate the characters, where's the harm?" If you must deal with the characters -- and it is hard to think of Chinese without them, though some have advocated that -- why not at least try to do so in a pleasurable way, with an appreciation for their aesthetic appeal?Reference books that are fun to use and which promote learning are few and far between. Rick Harbaugh's dictionary is certainly one of these. I often find myself on the T in Boston looking up a character or word in Chinese Characters, and subsequently getting lost on a trail that leads from character to character, from form to form, up and down and across the etymologies. It's grand fun, and the pleasure element will help you learn.And there are so many ways to move through the information. Chinese Characters features not only Harbaugh's "zhongwen zipu" etymological chart, but tables of characters arranged by more familiar radicals, pinyin, and stroke order. Most character entries feature references to compounds that contain the character in a position other than the initial one, making this a useful "Reverse" dictionary as well. There is also an English-Chinese index. All of this in about 550 well-designed and close-packed pages. I speak as a relatively new student of Chinese: this book is an absolute steal, and a joy.