Book review: Far East Pinyin Chinese-English Dictionary
Far East Pinyin Chinese-English Dictionary
The Far East Book Co, Taipei, 2001
ISBN: 9576124638
Cost:NT$450 at PageOne Bookstore, Taipei
One of the best things about this dictionary is its compact size. It is easy to handle and not too heavy or bulky so you can easily carry it round and refer to it. All the characters are arranged in alphabetical order according to Hanyu Pinyin. There is a Hanyu Pinyin index at the front of the book. It seems a little redundant, but it might be useful if you are not sure about the exact pronunciation of a character. There are also radical indexes and stroke number indexes at the back of the dictionary.
The format of the entries is very easy to read and particularly useful for someone who has a good knowledge of pinyin, but not characters. The entry for each character begins with the pinyin followed by the character in red type. There is then a definition or definitions of the character in English. Following this there is a list of words that begin with that character. The list is arranged with the word written in bold in pinyin first, followed by the character and a definition in English.
The definitions given are clear and concise, but there are no example sentences and it does not state whether the word is noun, adjective, particle, etc. There is an appendix with a table of countries and their capitals in pinyin. However, there is not always a corresponding entry in the dictionary so you cannot know the characters used for the name of the city or country.
Another appendix contains a comparitive chart of Hanyu Pinyin and Zhuyin Fuhao (also called bo po mo fo). Only traditional characters are used in the dictionary. When there is an alternate or simplified form of a character used in Taiwan this is noted in brackets. A table of simplified characters would make a useful addition to this dictionary. On the back of the dictionary it says that, "Beijing dialect is used as the standard pronunciation. The pronunciation used in Taiwan is also provided if there is any difference." However, in the text it is not really made clear where differences exist.
Some characters have multiple pronunciations and these are noted, but the addition of some notation to clearly indicate differences in pronunciation between Taiwan and China is really needed.
Similarly the dictionary includes words from both Taiwan and China, but doesn't make the origins clear. For example, jìchéngchē and chūzūchē are both defined as taxi. The former word is used in Taiwan and the latter in China. In Taiwan chūzūchē means hire car, but someone using the dictionary without this knowledge could easily be confused. Another example is tóngzhì. In the text it is defined as comrade. However, in Taiwan it is most commonly used to mean gay or homosexual.
Overall this dictionary is useful but it could be improved. In particular the differences in usage between Taiwan and China need to be made more clear. It is probably a good dictionary to carry around and use on the run, but it is not a definitive reference.
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Posted: May 13th, 2006 under Books, Chinese characters, Language learning, Languages in Taiwan, Mandarin (華語), Pinyin & romanisation.
Comments
Comment from David
Time 16 May 2006 at 7:19 am
Mark S, I think I will make that dictionary the next on my list to purchase. Even with the characters arranged in alphabetical order it still takes a bit of hunting around to find a word if you don’t know the first character. The ABC Pinyin Dictionary allows you to find any word even quicker.
Comment from jingyang
Time 16 May 2006 at 10:03 pm
Actually, while the ABC may be more comprehensive in terms of its range of entries, I found it less easy to use.
Because the words are in strict
pinyin alphabetical order, you get such counter-intuitive things as jia mao then jian bi then jia wei. This simply confuses the hell out of me frankly.
Add to this, the fact that one can often recognize enough of a clue to guess the sound, but not the correct tone, you have one hell of a lot of entries to go through. It doesn’t help at all that there are no “head” character entries either, they are all small print. Also, because it ignores the tones, even if you know the pronunciation, you still don’t know where the character maybe placed among ALL others with same pinyin but different tones. And in the case of Jian, it may even be placed in the middle of the “jia” entries. In addition, it means that ALL entries for a sound (NOTE: not a character) like “Jia” for example are effectively ordered by the beginning of the SECOND character in the word, it gets to be a huge problem when you are unsure of the second character, then you have to go through all the entries for all the characters using the sound “Jia”.
Basically to use the ABC most effectively, you have to either know the pronunciation of both characters, (in which case you probably have a good idea of their meaning anyway) or you have to look up BOTH characters in the stroke order or radical index first.
Personally I much prefer the Times dictionary for ease of use. Unfortunately for those of us in Taiwan, it uses simplified characters.
BTW, a very useful tool in the Lanbridge dictionary was a simple listing of all characters by pinyin and the page number of their entry so if you didn’t know the tone you could still go straight to the relevant entries.
Comment from The Spaceman
Time 17 May 2006 at 10:11 am
I would step over my mother for a English to BePeMe dictionary.
Comment from Chris
Time 20 May 2006 at 8:41 am
Spaceman
Check out A Prctical English-Chinese Pronouncing Dictionary by Janey Chen as it uses bomofo although some of the tone marks are in correct but it also uses Yale Pinyin
Pingback from David on Formosa
Time 5 December 2006 at 11:28 am
[...] I earlier reviewed the Far East Pinyin Chinese-English Dictionary. The ABC Dictionary actually takes the organisation of Chinese words by pinyin a step further. Rather than just indexing characters by pinyin it indexes individual words by pinyin. ABC is actually a clever acronym meaning “Alphabetically Based Computerized”. [...]
Comment from Mark S.
Time 13 May 2006 at 10:52 pm
All the characters are arranged in alphabetical order according to Hanyu Pinyin. (emphasis added)
Sigh. Another character dictionary pretending to be a Pinyin dictionary just because it has Pinyin in it. When are more companies going to start following the lead of the excellent ABC dictionaries, which are truly alphebetized (see “buda” for an example)?