Cheng & Tsui Chinese Character Dictionary: A Guide to the 2,000 Most Frequently-Used Characters

By Huidi Wang

Book Overview

For non-native speakers of Chinese, learning to write characters correctly is often a major stumbling block to mastery of the language.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0887273149
• ISBN13: 9780887273148
• Release Date: June 1999
• Publisher: Cheng & Tsui Co
• Length: 544 Pages
• Weight: 1.01 lbs.
• Dimensions: 7.0" x 1.0" x 4.5"

Customer Reviews

Excellent

Very helpful guide---other guides I've seen have been older, with the full etymology of the words/characters, but they were of little help because they hadn't been updated to Simplified Characters. This one is the best because it cuts across two or three different ways of helping you with Mandarin: 1) it's arranged by Pinyin, alphabetically---not by stroke order; 2) it has a full index in the VERY FRONT containing every character listed by Stroke Order and what page to find it on, if you don't know the pinyin for any given character; and 3) for each character, it gives you the printed (in books---the boxy-looking) version, the written (hand-writing it) version, the radical(s) involved and the stroke order, in a visual sequence. Also, for each entry, it gives similar words/phrases using that word/character. This is also a good guide because it has the most-used 2000 characters. The books with 100, 200 or even 500 are not enough. It's a small, paperback size, too, so it fits easily in your hand and it's easy to flip pages around, which happens a lot when you're looking for a Mandarin character!!

review for chinese dictionary

book was in excellent condition-very helpful for beginners in learning the language

Convenient Reference

I have been using this book for several years and find it to be an invaluable reference source for 1) characters that I have forgotten how to write, 2) new characters and 3) stroke order. What this book does not offer is a means to lookup words in English but this is not its intent, although a simple indexing of English words in alphabetical order with corresponding page numbers would be nice. However, since this is a "character" dictionary and not an "English to Chinese" dictionary this feature is understandably not part of the scope of this work. But, as a character dictionary of the most common simplified characters, this work excels! I strongly recommend it to any student of Chinese and I hope that Cheng and Tsui are able to follow-up on this excellent work with a traditional character version. It is estimated that a knowledge of the most frequently used 700 simplified characters enables an understanding of as much as 82% of the written language but that the ability to recognize and use the most common 2,000 characters bumps this percentage up to 97%. As an essential reference, Cheng and Tsui's "Chinese Character Dictionary" makes learning written Chinese that much easier.

A BIG Help

I am a seventh grade student taking Chinese and whenever I need help on the stroke orders I instantly turn to this book. It really has helped me improve my characters a lot!!

A Great Guide to Chinese Characters

This book goes through the 2000 most commonly used Chinese characters in a way that I haven't seen done before. It is very helpful because it includes just about every detail one would ever want to know about the character. One aspect that I appreciated was how it gave the character with other characters to show its many meanings. It was helpful to see the order of strokes needed to write the characters properly. For those who are studying Chinese on their own or through a class, this is a great book.