Chinese Characters: A Genealogy and Dictionary: A Geneolog [Taschenbuch]

In Australia I have found it difficult to find character dictionaries in traditional characters - I have a really good 'giant' dictionary which is impractical to carry around, but it uses simplified characters and only has a table of traditional characters in the back - not much help if you're learning to write traditional characters.

It actually took about 6 weeks for me to receive it in Australia, but it arrived just before I went to Taiwan on a study trip. I took it to show the Chinese teacher, and she was so impressed - she had never seen a dictionary arranged so well - that I gave it to her. Now I have to order another and one for my Chinese class classmate. I'm pleased to note that Amazon now has the book shipping in 1-2 weeks, I won't have to rely on my simplified dictionary for too long.

Highly recommended study tool.

Although it may not contain the greatest number of entries, this is inevitably the Chinese dictionary I turn to first, simply because it is so well designed, convenient and miraculously cross-referenced. Any student of Chinese knows that dictionary look-up can be a grave pain: none of the standard look-up methods is very reliable or fast, and many of the best, most complete and authoritative dictionaries are arranged in such a way that use is difficult unless one already knows a host of characters.

Rick Harbaugh has taken the wild garden of Chinese characters and made it an enjoyable, fun place for study or sheer wandering. One of the other reviewers here pointedly questions the value and/or accuracy of many of Harbaugh's "etymologies" -- while I am nowhere near linguist enough to refute this reader's claims or otherwise argue with him/her, I guess my response (or question) would be "what does it matter? If the book helps a learner memorize and appreciate the characters, where's the harm?" If you must deal with the characters -- and it is hard to think of Chinese without them, though some have advocated that -- why not at least try to do so in a pleasurable way, with an appreciation for their aesthetic appeal?

Reference books that are fun to use and which promote learning are few and far between. Rick Harbaugh's dictionary is certainly one of these. I often find myself on the T in Boston looking up a character or word in Chinese Characters, and subsequently getting lost on a trail that leads from character to character, from form to form, up and down and across the etymologies. It's grand fun, and the pleasure element will help you learn.

And there are so many ways to move through the information. Chinese Characters features not only Harbaugh's "zhongwen zipu" etymological chart, but tables of characters arranged by more familiar radicals, pinyin, and stroke order. Most character entries feature references to compounds that contain the character in a position other than the initial one, making this a useful "Reverse" dictionary as well. There is also an English-Chinese index. All of this in about 550 well-designed and close-packed pages.

I speak as a relatively new student of Chinese: this book is an absolute steal, and a joy.