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Chinese Characters: A Genealogy and Dictionary: A Geneolog

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I think this is a very useful tool for learning Chinese characters. As any student of Chinese knows, you will always need more than one dictionary - they all have different specialties - this one is affordable, comprehensive, compact, and the multiple methods of searching for characters and cross referencing make it easy to use.

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.

This dictionary is very useful in writing letters and prose. Word (English and pinyin) lookup is also very simple simple. I highly recommend it to all my friends who want to learn Chinese. The printing of the Chinese characters in this book are very legible, not true in other "Dictionaries".

This review is long overdue. My copy of Chinese Characters: A Genealogy and Dictionary is already becoming worn with use. It has rapidly become one of my favorite books.

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.

The dictionary is indeed perhaps the best book available in English which attempts to present mutual relations between the Chinese characters.

The sole problem is that it is based on the first character dictionary compiled in the beginning of our era when the bone script characters were already lost. Without knowledge of the bone script a genealogy (or morphology) of the Chinese characters can not be consistent as the character shapes have changed between 700--200 B.C. much more than ever after. So I would call Harbaugh's dictionary a traditional genealogy not a systematic (or argumented) genealogy.

This book is amazing -- it cuts a clear and wide path through the cluttered, confused, and obstacle-laden road that learning Chinese characters can often be. This book enables the learner to fairly easily step back far enough to see the big picture of how the myriad characters -- and their individual graphical components, meanings, and prononciations -- are interrelated to each other. There's a lot that can be learned in this process. It's fun to just look through its pages and follow the interconnections between related characters -- when you do this you're likely to learn at least a couple of new characters along the way. Useful, illuminating, engrossing, and nicely designed reference book.

The best thing about this book is that it provides explanations that help the student make sense of the elements in each Chinese character. To the best of my knowledge, these are not made-up fantasies, but based on established Chinese etymologies. But for the student, the important point is that the etymologies assist in committing the characters to memory. Moreover, in addition to the etymologies, the book not only provides examples of the character in compounds, but also includes references to compounds where it appears as the second element, making it an excellent tool for learning new vocabulary. Although it is not primarily a dictionary, the arrangement and indexes mean that one can use it that way. I wish my teachers had taught me in accordance with the explanations in this book when I started studying Chinese 20+ years ago. I still find it useful as an aid to learning characters & their compounds.

I have been a longtime user of Harbaugh's on-line dictionary and was delighted to learn there is now a book version. For Chinese students like me who often confuse similar characters or need all the mnemonic devices we can get, the genealogical approach to grouping characters is very useful and welcome. You won't find obscure character combinations here, but the dictionary amply covers the basics. Chinese students up to the intermediate or advanced intermediate level will get a lot of use out of this dictionary. My only complaint is that the stroke-order index is not well organized. But everything else is done quite well, especially for students who focus on traditional rather than simplified characters.

This is the best! The six indexes at the back make it the most versatile chinese dictionary I have used so far. As well, I have found the genealogical descriptions not only interesting but a helpful "hook" for remembering characters. If I was limited to only one Chinese dictionary (horrors!), this would be it.

I found this dictionary incredibly helpful in my Chinese studies. It breaks down the character promoting the understanding of the root characters. In my study of Chinese, I found that I was able to decipher words that I have never seen before! What is also great is that one can use many different method to find a word. Thanks for a great dictionary! Keep up the great work!

This is the most helpful Chinese dictionary I have come across in 2 years of studying the language. The etymological setup is extremely useful, and moreoever it makes it much easier to remember different characters. I highly recommend this to anyone learning the language.