Noncompositional

I was recently shopping for a good Chinese-English (and E-C) dictionary, and noticed a difference between character lookup methods between Chinese and Japanese. In all the Chinese dictionaries I looked at (not a lot, admittedly), there were a total of two methods: by radical, and by pronunciation. Japanese dictionaries add a third method: total number of strokes. Now, of course number of strokes is important for Chinese dictionaries as well: the radicals and the characters listed under them are organized by stroke count. But the Japanese dictionaries I have/had allow for total strokes in the character (presumably for cases where it’s unclear what the radical is — at least, that’s usually why I use that method). Maybe some non-foreign-language Chinese dictionaries also have such a list and I didn’t see it…but it would be interesting if they didn’t! (and just to point it out, Japanese has many options in the pronunciation-lookup method, thanks to the ridiculous numbers of pronunciations for characters: the electronic kanji dictionary that I have even allows me to look up the pronunciation of the radical! (which comes in handy if…uh…I don’t feel like inputting digits).

I ended up picking up a copy of the Collins Chinese Concise Dictionary, mostly because I didn’t want a huge tome, didn’t want a really small dictionary, and did want a lot of example sentences. As far as I’m concerned, for foreign language dictionaries, example sentences are far more useful than the (often vague, sometimes deceptive) one-word equivalences that some dictionaries give. The Collins does have some strange properties, though. It presents itself in the beginning as a dictionary for English speakers — the very first section is on how Chinese is challenging for speakers of European languages, and it gives a brief detail of some features of Chinese that make naive learners sound foreign (for instance, leaving out topical NPs, plain juxtaposition of clauses for conditional and temporal-sequence utterances, classifiers, and so on).

It then goes on to give an explanation of the dictionary entries, in both Chinese and English. From then on, it seems to cater to a Chinese speaker who is learning English. The E-to-C section contains set-off sections explaining (in Chinese) some difficult near-synonymies in English, and entries in the C-to-E side contain meta-data in Chinese (for instance, British and American spelling alternatives are separated by 或 ‘or’ rather than English or). The end of the dictionary contains a “Language in Action” section on how to use English/Chinese in “common” situations, like telling time, asking directions, and submitting cover letters for job applications. The section aimed at learners of English is about four times as long as the one aimed at learners of Chinese (55 vs 14 pages). This seems a bit quirky to me, but otherwise it’s a fine dictionary.