Oxford Chinese Dictionary [Englisch] [Gebundene Ausgabe]

Every work has its limitations. Here, the English to Chinese section translates English only into characters, with no pinyin. Basically this section is written for Chinese speakers or else English speakers who already read Chinese very well. That is not me! I will often use the English to Chinese section of a dictionary to find a difficult character by guessing from context what it might mean, or to check if I have correctly understood a translation from the Chinese to English side. I cannot do that with this dictionary.

I can only review the Chinese to English section. If you read Chinese beyond a textbook learners level, or if you are a translator then you should have this.

The page layouts are beautiful, and the fonts are larger than other comprehensive Chinese-English dictionaries. As John Dowdell says in his review, it covers far more compound words and phrases than any other Chinese-English dictionary, and these compounds repay the time it takes to read them.

Students do not have to go far in Chinese before meeting phrases that make no sense on a word-by-word basis. Seeing the same or a nearby phrase here will overcome the problem. And even with smaller dictionaries often the easiest way to look up a difficult character is to look up the head character of the phrase it occurs in. That strategy will work much more often with this dictionary than with others.

Translators are likely to benefit too. I am far from translating Chinese but I have published translations from French and German into English. Sometimes you know very well what a sentence means but for a published translation you really can use some help in seeing how best to express it in English. This dictionary will give a great deal of that help.

The one to compare with this is The Contemporary Chinese Dictionary (Chinese-English Edition). It is only Chinese to English, and when you adjust for the different layouts it is very nearly the same length as the Chinese to English section of this. It has many fewer compound words and phrases, and many fewer study aids of the kind that Dowdell describes well in his review of this book. It has correspondingly more distinct characters. By comparing a couple of randomly chosen ranges it seems that The Contemporary Chinese Dictionary (Chinese-English Edition) contains about 30% more distinct single characters than this Oxford dictionary (specifically I compared from cou4 to cun2, and again from qie1 to qin4, which both gave the same result). I cannot attempt any more subtle comparison of how the two dictionaries handle definitions.

The dictionary comes with a free one year subscription to Oxford Language Dictionaries Online: Chinese. When you get past the bugs you find resources far less useful than are available free on line. There is, for example, a list of "useful phrases" such as "hello" and "what is your name?" If your Mandarin is at that level then there are infinitely many websites with more helpful phrases available free -- and you do not want this dictionary yet. There are pages of grammatical advice far less valuable than you can access free at Chinesepod. The Chinese look-up system is far less useful than the free dictionary (which even has handwritten character recognition) at Yellowbridge. If you are reading Chinese then you should get this dictionary. But Oxford Language Dictionaries Online is an utter waste of time as far as I can see.

Although the dictionary is impressive by the size and ammount of words available it has a big problem the English to Chinese section translates English only into characters, with no pinyin nor MPS, so basically the dictionary was published for Chinese speakers or English speakers who already read Chinese very well.

Unfortunately this dictionary is not intended for the chinese learner.

This is a hugely significant work. It's much more fresh than the body of aging comprehensive dictionaries so on the basis of the dictionary itself I'd have no qualms giving it five stars on the basis of the content. If you have need of a large authoritative paper dictionary then this is a fairly epic effort.

One curious feature is the supplementary content which is dotted through the huge tomb on a variety of subjects, most of which I think you could call elementary in level. This strikes me as a bit of a miss match between in audience given that only head words on the Chinese to English side are given in pinyin. Unlikely to bother the intermediate student perhaps but the lack of pinyin for corresponding Chinese words in English to Chinese could be quite frustrating at times for anyone. Of course the solution is to view it electronically where you can use tools to tell you anything you don't know and it was with that in mind, coupled with claims of "wherever you are" on the front cover, that I justified the buying decision.

Unfortunately as another reviewer has pointed out, the online access is actually very poor. Worse still, only on the inside cover is it mentioned that the online action is, and I quote, "Chinese language only (based on the Pocket Oxford Chinese Dictionary)." Right, so basically it's not this dictionary at all. It's an older concise version you could just go and view on the infinitely more competent nciku web site. This is, to be frank, scandalous.

Potential buyers should beware. For all the trumpeting online functionality, what you actually get online isn't the dictionary you are buying. Quite why it is a selling point to obtain poor online access to an older concise dictionary is completely beyond my fathoming. Not for the first time I, and many others I suspect, will be forced to re-buy the dictionary in some sort of electronic form when they deign to licence the content (to Pleco for pete's sake). If only OUPs online efforts were in the same league as the excellent work of the hard working team that created this marvellous dictionary.

A wonderful dictionary then yet falsely advertised with the electronic practicality it so desperately needs to make the impact it deserves.