Hello. I tried to do a search on Forumosa, but I think my question was too vague to find the right post.
I’ve noticed there are a lot of English to Chinese dictionaries. Like, picturebooks or books about things in rooms. Very nice, and I picked up one to try to learn Chinese words for things. But what I haven’t found is a Chinese to English dictionary. What I mean is, say I see a character on a sign and wonder, “Well, what does that character mean?” How do i look it up?
Is there a Chinese to English dictionary? Like… a way to look up characters without knowing what they are? Or an alphabetical-type list? Like, if I see the word onion but don’t know what it means I can go to “O” in the dictionary and find it. Is this true with Chinese, or is it totally different? I can’t really seem to tell, and so far when I ask people they don’t really know either. They get confused…
Like, the name of my street is Yungan, and I can see the Chinese characters. but I can’t really just look up the words yungan. And if I have to go to someone and ask them what the sign means, they have to speak English.
This is especially frustrating for me because street signs don’t have accents. After a month in Taiwan, I STILL don’t know how to say the name of my street right! Sometimes taxi cab drivers look at me puzzledly when I say Yungan too slow… So I usually just say it as fast as possible and hope they get it.
Anyways, I’m hoping that one day I’ll hit upon the one flash card or chapter in my book that has the word Yung and I’ll finally know what the heck it means and how to say it.
永安 yong an in pinyin. Yong means “forever” and an means “peaceful.” Try to make sure you’re getting the tones right.Yong is 3rd tone, an is 1st tone. Hope that helps.
To answer your question about looking up Chinese words. To find words in a Chinese dictionary, they count the strokes of the first word and then look on a table of all words that have that many strokes. Sounds kind of difficult, but it can be done. I have seen dictionaries that you could search for words using pinyin, but it was Yale Romanization rather than Mainland pinyin, which is much better.
Hello aahz,
There are multiple ways to look up Chinese characters (and compound terms) if you don’t know what they mean.
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If you know the pronunciation of a character or compound term, you can use a pinyin- or bopomofo-indexed dictionary to look it up. The best of the former group IMO are the ABC series by DeFrancis, e.g. the ABC Comprehensive. This book is HIGHLY recommended.
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If you don’t know the pronunciation, there are various methods for looking them up, but the most common is to identify the bushou (section header, often called ‘radical’), search under a bushou index to find the list of characters contained thereunder, and then search within that by either stroke count or the first two strokes. Most Chinese-Chinese and some Chinese-English dictionaries use this method.
If you had the ABC dictionaries by DeFrancis, you could indeed look up Yong’an without knowing the characters or tones, and all compound words romanized (in Hanyu Pinyin) as Yongan would be listed jointly for your comparison. Yong’an (yong3an1, that is 永安) clearly means eternal peace, and the ABCC defines it as ‘perpetual peace’.
Or, you could simply get a nice iPhone or mobile device based app like PlecoDict, trace the shape of the character with your index finger (well, any finger will do, really!) and know what it is. No stroke order, no radicals, no muss, no fuss. Actually the new version of PlecoDict will allow lookup using the camera on the iPhone.
Apologies to the learned people on the board, but this is the way Chinese is going, and especially for those who will not delve deeply into the language, but want it for more utilitarian purposes, this is the way to go.
Actually, ironlady’s suggestion is good. They also make dedicated electronic dictionaries with this function, although I imagine that it would be more convenient to have that as an added application on something with other functions, like an iPhone.
If tracing with your finger or a stylus, does it help if you write it in the traditional stroke order and direction, or does the software merely match the final result graphically to its database regardless of how you got there?
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Learn Hanyu pinyin and Mandarin Phonetic Symbols (bo po mo fo)
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Run don’t walk to buy the ABC Defrancis dictionary recommended above.
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You are in Taiwan. Instead of looking characters up by stroke order ( a huge waste of time and frustrating to boot unless you already literate) or using a phone, just ask people how to read a character. 99% of people will be happy to help. They will spell it out for you in Mandarin Phonetic Symbols (which is why you need to learn them) and then you can look your word up in the ABC Defrancis dictionary.
I cringe every time I read this. Granted, there are some useful bits in that dictionary. I especially like how all noun entries tell you which measure word(s) to use. The thing that I hate about it is the degree they went to in alphabetization. I didn’t pick the dictionary up until about five years of learning Chinese, and I was alredy totally used to looking things up by the first syllable/character in the word. The degree of alphabetization along with the lack of example sentences mean that this dictionary sits mostly unused in my bookcase.
[quote=“Feiren”]
- You are in Taiwan. Instead of looking characters up by stroke order ( a huge waste of time and frustrating to boot unless you already literate) or using a phone, just ask people how to read a character. 99% of people will be happy to help. They will spell it out for you in Mandarin Phonetic Symbols (which is why you need to learn them) and then you can look your word up in the ABC Defrancis dictionary.[/quote]
I agree with the part about getting them to write MPS, but beginners need to keep in mind that some Taiwaneezers’ pronunciation may not be “standard,” especially for the retroflex sounds.
The pronunciation is often non-standard, but most people can spell correctly in MPS. Pronounce as they spell, not as they say it. Anyway, non-standard pronunciation is just a fact of Chinese-speaking life.
Does anyone have a recommendation for a good chinese to English dictionary for use on my laptop. I am looking for one that I can use without being connected to the internet and that I can use both bopomofo and pinyin when looking up words.
Any recommendations would be appreciated