Oxford Beginner's Chinese Dictionary REV ed. Edition

A truly nice fresh approach. Excellent use of color.It isn't simply a dictionary. In the English-Chinese section there are many useful tables and teaching aids.For example:under "expression", at the end of the "E" words, is a page and a half of "Useful everyday expressions".under "have" is a whole page on how English expressions using the word "have" correspond with similar Chinese expressionsunder "measure" there is a page long table of length and weight measurementsOften there are many examples of usage. Just after the table on measurements we have the word "meet". Several example usages are given.e.g."she met him on the street""have you met tom?""can we meet next week""can this meet your requirements"etc.I also has a well presented index and an appendix called "Learning and lifestyle kit" on subjects like "Dictionary Know How" - Chinese characters don't have an alphabetical order like the one I am accustomed to, so how does one arrange them in sequence? Very helpful and nicely presented.All I want, is to be able to communicate in Chinese. The finer points of fancy grammatical constructs and terminology are for a different category of learner.What a really neat (in both colloquial and traditional senses of the word) balance this publication achieves.

When I started the Spring term this year of college I was excited to see that Chinese 111 was being taught; which is unusual since a lot 111 classes tend to start in the Fall. In taking the course, my professor Dr. Lee encouraged us all to buy this dictionary, so we will have access to more words and phrases that are unavailable in our text book and work book.This book in his words is the best book for all Chinese students; and it really has proved useful to me already.The book provides the student not only the basic English to Pin Ying, but it also give you Traditional and Simplified characters which are so very important to learn.If you are planning a trip to China, wanting to take a class in Chinese, watch martial art films without subtitles -- buy this book and begin your studies ASAP!(Readers will not gain insight and knowledge right off the bat without study. Understanding that in going to China that the characters are what you need to learn to read will help you even further. This book will not make you as good at fighting as Bruce Lee or Jet Li. Eating excessive amounts of Chinese food and having this book will not make you any more ready to hold a full conversation than playing World of Warcraft makes you ready for dating.)

I'm self-studying Mandarin Chinese in preparation for an upcoming trip to China and purchased this dictionary as a supplement to the excellent Pimsleur Conversational Mandarin Chinese audio course. As most reviewers have said, it is a good book: well organized, reasonably complete for a visitor, excellent format, easy to use. By this I mean English - Chinese translations are shown in both Pinyin and 2 character formats as well as usage in a sentence or phrase. Chinese - English words are listed alphabetically using Pinyin. There's also lots of supplemental material like measures, numbers, etc. and even a section on basic rules for writing Chinese characters.This is all great and I would rate the book 5 stars if the authors had included another section on basic rules for pronunciation and speaking Mandarin Chinese. All it would have taken is 3 or 4 pages on the phonetics and tonal inflections for the Pinyin system which is used to represent the sounds of Chinese characters with western-style letters. It's not enough being able to look up a word if, once found, you're not sure how to say it.For those of you with iPhones and iPads, there's a good free series by "trainchinese" in the iTunes store. The base module has a large dictionary where you can save words and phrases into flash cards and use a pretty accurate audio feature to hear pronunciation. There are also free Pinyin, Numbers and Writing modules as well as a Common Word and Phrase library. The dictionary allows unlimited lookups and 10 flash cards / week for free. You can buy the feature to create additional flash cards but in either case, whatever you save is yours to keep.

I speak a couple of languages and have struggled with Chinese for some time. Friends in China help me on the net and an audio course picks up some more slack. This dictionary, however, is a wonderful addition to my reference library, since it offers a range of useful words and phrases that are most likely to come up in everyday life in China, among the people who might not speak any English. In view of the fact that I learn by knowing certain sounds correspond to certain letters of the alphabet used in the west, the Pinyin provided alongside the simplified Chinese characters is an eminently sensible resource.I wish Oxford had a similar dictionary for the next level up, as I also bought the intermediate Chinese dictionary which, unfortunately, has no Pinyin and is actually meant for native Chinese speakers wishing to learn English.The beginner's Chinese dictionary is definitely my go-to dictionary and will probably never leave my side when I go there next year.