How good is your Chinese dictionary

At present the importance of the Chinese language is getting more and more bigger even for those of us, who could say that Chinese is of no need for them, if asked something like 10 years ago; and the necessity to learn it was as much as zero; not to mention its use on the Web.

It may be quite possible that even the great Google is not able to inform the approximate number of surfers, using or trying to use the Chinese language. This may not be in direct connection with the fact Chinese, de facto, has become a number one in the world, but knowing and using the language look attractive due to some economic reasons.

The fact is at Far East some secondary schools have already introduced Chinese language as an obligatory subject; but there is another fact proved with many people’s experience that it’ll take some longer time to get this language as common as English all around the globe.

In our hi-tech millennium the role of electronic tools becomes more significant, especially when it comes to facilitating of translation from and into or just learning such a hard language. The very first idea coming forward is a dictionary, a Chinese-English dictionary. But how can one pick a good Chinese dictionary? How to define this or that is of a good contents and usability? What are the criteria a good dictionary should meet? All these like many other questions, sooner or later, are faced with the learners and translators.

From the point of view of media a dictionary may be on, there are two kinds: (1) a book, or a paper dictionary; and, (2) electronic one. The latter is the subject of this article as soon as we’re dealing with Internet. Fortunately, for both paper and electronic dictionaries the quality requirements are almost the same, which is what we are going to employ.

The main and the most important sign that this is a good Chinese dictionary is the total number of characters collected within it; and, please, note: we are talking about Chinese characters and not Chinese words. It happens quite often the title pages bear the total number of words and phrases altogether, which may confuse the uninitiated and serves good for your marketing department only. Well, if a dictionary claims the total number of Chinese characters in it and it is really so, then it’s cool.

The next in the row of significance stands the illustrations made with phrases and examples related to a particular character nest. As a rule it is either a set of words beginning with the character or phrasal variations with the character inside. If one sees something like that in the dictionary, he can add another point to its value.

Because we’re talking about a Chinese dictionary we should take into account the features of this language; and here we have to mention the existence of simplified and traditional characters, which are used with the same frequency and endevour on both sides of Taiwan straight. In the event the dictionary under consideration offers both kinds of characters, or what is better it gives them in parallel, this dictionary is getting even more interesting.

The integral part of any good dictionary is parts of speech tagging; and a good dictionary tags every character showing any possible option in the field. However, not all novices can distinct between parts of speech used in the dictionary and the function a character, or its derivatives, may play in a sentence: it makes a huge difference in Chinese and that’s why this feature, if available, makes a dictionary valuable.

The next estimation step is checking for availability of word usage examples with reference to a specific field of application, or an industry in other words; if this is true, then you’ve got a pretty useful dictionary that may become a great helper of yours. Many cheap or not professionally compiled dictionaries lack this feature or, on the contrary, abound in them in sporadic manner, which is not good, too.

Generally, a good Chinese dictionary, an electronic dictionary, possesses a comfortable user interface, simple lookup facility and results outputted as a catalogue tree, fruited with examples and comments, helping to grasp the subtle differences in application.