As a professional teacher of Mandarin Chinese, I recommend that every serious learner should spend decent time on basic knowledge of Chinese-English dictionary(CED) in order to learn faster and easier.
Why? Selecting?the right?Chinese-English dictionary is a lot harder than selecting a French-English dictionary, which you can do with your eyes closed.?There are far more CEDs and a CED plays a much greater role in learning than a French-English dictionary.
Here are the standards to choose a CED good enough for you to use for 5 years:
No. 1 Uses pinyin as the primary system for representing word pronunciation.
A CED without pinyin is simply not worth considering. The zhuyin (bopomofo) method which is used in Taiwan is going outdated.
No. 2 Lists both traditional and simplified characters.
Simplified characters have been in use in publication in mainland China for half a century. Traditional characters are used for thousands of years and are still being used in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and all overseas Chinese communities. In mainland students are required to learn Classic Chinese in high school, in which traditional characters are widely used. The art of Chinese drawing and calligraphy are all embraced by traditional characters even today. Traditional characters are making a comeback.
Nol.3 List entries according to the pinyin spellings.
This feature enables you to find a Chinese word by its pronunciation. Supposing you hear a word in class or during a conversation or somewhere else, and want to look it up, it will be important to be able to look it up by its pronunciation.
No. 4 Both characters and pinyin are shown in English-to-Chinese translation.
Beginners are not likely to know how the Chinese word or phrase should be pronounced, this feature should spare the need to do a reverse lookup of the Chinese characters for pronunciation.
No. 5 find a character without knowing it's pronunciation.
It's must-have feature for learners to find a Chinese character without knowing how it's pronounced.
If you find a character you don't recognize while reading a book, you obviously don't know how it is pronounced and you'll need to?find the character in the traditional way, by determining the character's?main radical and number of strokes, an "admittedly painful" process.
The great news is, with an online CED or Electronic CED, you can write the character, the software recognizes the character you write and search in the database. The pain of old-fashioned process is gone.
Happy study
It's definitely necessary to give it decent time to learn the basics of Chinese-English dictionary, because the Chinese language is unique a proper Chinese-English dictionary plays a uniquely important role in learning.
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