Review of Adrian van Amstel's Chinese Character Dictionary

[Gharial 130]

Review of: Chinese Character Dictionary (漢英字典 / 汉英字典): A new approach to arranging, explaining and looking up Chinese characters, by Adrian van Amstel. CreateSpace (an Amazon company) 2016, updated with minor amendments October 2018. 613 pages, paperback (NB: 530-page Simplified / 汉英字典 edition also available). Price just over £16 (incl. P&P) at time of writing.

I spotted this on Amazon the other day and decided to get a copy as the entries bring together characters that share the same phonetic component, while providing small seal (小篆) script forms for at least those phonetics/series headers*. I'm also a sucker for unusual and possibly innovative indexing systems, which the CCD seems to have (though it appears in some respects similar to the broadly "shape-based", also stroke-counting-free, yey! approach of Foerster & Tamura's 1994 Kanji ABC, a concise but very systematic aide-memoire to the then merely 1,945 Jōyō 常用 kanji. It's a shame its companion website http://www.kanjiabc.net/ has been down for a while now, but the Takoboto dictionary's online or app multiple radical-form look-up is a very serviceable alternative: http://takoboto.jp/ ). I hadn't read that much of the limited Look Inside preview on Amazon, or of the author's website (which I gleaned from the preview - for the URLs, see the penultimate line of this review, and the second footnote) before ordering - slight impulse buy, then! - so it was only once the book had arrived that I realized (and was intrigued to discover, as I'm working on just such an undertaking myself) that the CCD attempts to provide guidelines for parsing away those parts extraneous to the phonetic in any given character: 'users of the CCD can find any character by stripping it first of its radicals ... and then splitting the remaining phonetic into components ... The phonetic can be found under one of its components' (from the back cover. Note the plural 'radicals').

Unfortunately these guidelines (I'd hesitate to call them rules, as they are in all honesty pretty badly presented, don't seem comprehensive enough anyway, and assume far too much existing awareness of radical types and especially positions rather than simply concentrating on character layout and shape in general) only get one as far as the all-important hurdle of the Main Component Table (now thanks to a reviewer's comment on Amazon.com helpfully reproduced at the rear of the updated edition - previously the user would've had to refer to the one on pages 48-49), which proceeds via its 339 items spread over 17 sections (with sections 1-10 consisting of items with mainly slanting strokes, sections 11-16 of predominantly straight horizontal or vertical lines, and section 17 of roughly evenly-split irregulars) to insist on dividing phonetics that most other references see fit to keep, if invariably rather conventionally index, as wholes (as there is often little to be gained, certainly not phonetically, from subdividing them). More on this after the next paragraph. Incidentally, the MCT may contain a(ny) number of errors if its omission of 习 (i.e. section 8's 16th component) is anything to go by, which will only add to look-up difficulties.

One then takes whichever of the phonetic's thus divided items comes earliest in the MCT and goes to that section in the dictionary proper, where the items are built back up or further in more detailed section tables (the subsections of which manifest as Character Tables spread throughout the sections, with page numbers on the section table indicating the start of each subsection, though these should've been aligned with the beginning rather than final line for the bigger subsections of the section table, as that would make them easier to follow**), that list about 1,800 phonetics in total for almost 7,500 characters. All those phonetics contained on a page appear in a running header (though this isn't as eye-strain-free as the author may've hoped, and just adds to the scanning load). There are thus at least four look-up stages involved in using the CCD: parse away all but the phonetic > break it down as necessary (see next para) into MCT components and establish their "proper" ordering therein > turn "if need be" to the appropriate section table to build it back up or further and find the rough starting page > turn to at least that page and scan the running header items on or beyond it to find the appropriate phonetic/series header, and thus the characters springing from it. (Experienced users could start to truncate these steps, but even they could do with the addition of dark tabs in the main margins to indicate at least the section numbers, especially when directed in an entry to turn to a related form in such and such a section elsewhere in the dictionary*** - one otherwise has no choice, short of committing things to memory or defacing the combined fore-edge of the pages with handwritten indications, but to turn back to the rear MCT to find the starting page number for the section involved).

Anyway, to take a straightforward example from the book's covers, the phonetic 台 (as in say 始) is divided and looked up under 厶 rather than 口 as the former has slanting rather than straight strokes (the 横折, horizontal-downturning second stroke of 口 notwithstanding). "Similarly", 奄 (yǎn, the phonetic in 腌 ā/yān - yup, I went through some of the A section characters from the Pocket Oxford to test the CCD's system) is found via 电 diàn (in section 7) as 乚-type shapes come before the 人-type of section 10's 大 (one thus needs to become conversant not only with diverging vs straight line categories, but subtypes of each. This also explains how the other example from the cover, 矣, is looked up under 厶 rather than 矢). Regarding 申 shēn, the potential user will be pleased to know it is only to be found in section 16 (where a supposed likeness to 田 fudges things further), with no indication there of any link between these arguably (phonetically-)related forms (申 and 电), though the section 7 电 entry at least mentions gives the 申 form in passing (though not its section number, 16). As for what the CCD actually views as "superimposed" components plural, the rule given on page 44 ('Usually this kind of characters [sic] is listed under the first of its constituent components') thankfully seems more often conformed to than not (as shown in 束 [木 then 口], 晝 [聿 then 日 then 一], and to some extent 熏 [viewed as 千 then 黑], but not 隶 [氺 then 彐 apparently]), but the examples may well have been hand-picked to coincide with the MCT order. Incidentally, the "etymologies" at the entries for both 矣 and 台 appear to have misprinted the 已 in their 已 > 厶 note (in which the > means 'was over time changed into') as something like 㠯 ( https://www.unicode.org/cgi-bin/GetUnihanData.pl?codepoint=㠯 ), but with a small gap in the northwest corner (as in 已).

Things get trickier with denser characters such as 幕 mù, the second worked example in the Quick Start Guide in the Introduction, 'which at the top has the radical 艹 and at the bottom in the centre the radical 巾 . Both radicals are not connected to other elements, and therefore have to be ignored in the first step' (my italics). While it is true as the author points out (albeit 14 pages later on page 28, there discussing especially bottom radicals in relation to parsings) that when 'placed between the diverging strokes of the upper part' (well, an upper part itself coming below other parts) the "between" part is the radical (at least traditionally) and the upper parts the phonetic, what honestly is the point of parsing away 艹 too, or indeed any of the upper parts? (There is certainly no phonetic point to doing so, as all three elements are needed to attain phonetic mass in 莫 mò; that is, 旲 tái, or possibly yīng, which isn't in the CCD and so rare that Unihan lists only its pronunciations and no meanings, is obviously of little or no phonetic relevance here). Ah, 艹 isn't in the MCT, apparently it's too common a radical or something, that'd be why presumably (slightly exasperated eyeroll). Or perhaps in at least this particular instance one is meant to keep parsing until there are at most only two "central" components left to put into MCT order (if so, this doesn't seem to be spelt out anywhere). There are to be sure more unexplained or only half-explained things or just plain oddities, such as how on earth 卹 in the test examples on page 43 gets devolved primarily into the MCT representative categories~shapes 13 十 and 16 口 for 卩 and 血 respectively (category 5 say, which includes 𠬝 https://www.unicode.org/cgi-bin/GetUnihanData.pl?codepoint=20B1D , would make more sense for 卩).

Two examples of more complex parsings involve 綮 (pg 27) and 罰 (29). While it may be "reasonable" with 綮 to expect the user to learn that 攵 is apparently always (a radical) to be parsed away when it is broadly on the "right", and that 糸 can according to a (the author's) "2+1" rule (that is, when the upper part of the character it is in consists of at least two components standing side by side, which in this case is 户 plus 攵, and which as is pointed out incidentally forms the phonetic in this type of structure) also be parsed away, leaving only 户 as the "correct" (and indeed only possible provided) means of look up in the CCD, it seems correspondingly perverse to insist that 詈 lì (found "under" 言 rather than 罒) is the intuitive phonetic, and 刂 rather than 罒 the throwaway, in 罰 fá (㦒 lí https://www.unicode.org/cgi-bin/GetUnihanData.pl?codepoint=㦒 would however be a different story, again were it included in much other than the Unihan database). In other words, why not extend the "2+1" rule to instances where the 2 are at the bottom rather than the top? These are each roughly triangular arrangements, the one like an ice cream cone V, the other pyramidal ^. A simple note or cross-reference could then direct one from the positionally intuitive phonetic (䚯 https://www.unicode.org/cgi-bin/GetUnihanData.pl?codepoint=䚯 ) to the "correct" (but unintuitive) phonetic (詈). (NB: If you think this paragraph is hard to follow, try reading large parts of the Introduction LOL).

It's interesting to compare the proportion of Kanji ABC graphemes to kanji, versus CCD components~phonetics to characters. The numbers are in raw terms almost equivalent (1,945/484**** vs 7,450/[339<]1,800 = 4.018 vs at least 4.138, i.e. each work apparently indexically or organizationally "needs" roughly one item per 4 to 5 characters), but whether the CCD has too many unnecessary and/or too-split components (as one might reasonably expect each component to do ever greater work despite more characters being added - Zipf's law or something?) is beyond the scope of this review. What is beyond doubt however is that only so much can be crammed onto a (reasonably concise and legible) main index table, and (but) if the user is having to continually flick back and forth between tables plural, each quite far removed from the other, then the indexing system has likely become too unwieldy. Exact numbers (and what about what should be the all-important parsing?!) aside, the CCD is too often forcing the user to look things up one, ultimately more or less random, component at a time (this is true somewhat though of Kanji ABC also, where 魚 is located in a 田 group rather than under ⺈ https://www.unicode.org/cgi-bin/GetUnihanData.pl?codepoint=2008A , but at least Kanji ABC fits all its graphemes onto a single double-spread table at its rear) than more holistically. A better way surely has to be found (and can, with enough thought - watch this space!), if a dictionary is to win sufficient converts, and why not make more actual use of established items such as the historical radicals, and of phonetic wholes etc.

The CCD's poor instructions, if not general design (and thus potential user) problems, can likely be traced back to something the author says in the 2018 'Preface to the latest update' that follows the original 2016 Preface: 'The ideal would be to make sure that all characters are listed under their phonetic part, and that the phonetic part can be determined in a straightforward manner by stripping the character of its independently standing radicals. Of course, this is impossible. ... Therefore, I have chosen for a more pragmatic approach, and that is one in which all characters can be found with a fairly simple and straightforward method, and in which most characters are listed under their phonetic part. In case of an exception, often a short etymology was added to make users aware of the fact.' Formulating such parsing rules however is obviously no easy task (though a very worthwhile one, in terms of increasing visual awareness, decoding ability etc in the learner, and developing hopefully innovative and useful dictionaries or study aids), and this is the first dictionary I'm aware of that even attempts something like this. For that alone it is to be commended, even if the indexing has proved to be quite the distraction in this review at least. (Not sure it can quite be fully recommended, though).

Looking beyond the indexing system to the entries themselves, the "etymologies" seem broadly similar to (though not quite as clear as) those in Harbaugh's Chinese Characters, and in turn Wieger's - see http://zhongwen.com/ - while the compounds or phrases are sparing and the examples (which it should be noted supply no Pinyin) short; most of the work is thus done by the definitions. Readers can decide for themselves if the following sample entry provides enough information generally:  [没] 沒  méi 1. Not have; not (~门儿 méiménr no way; impossible) 2. Not as (我~你高 I am not as tall as you). (Note in the CCD that simplified or standardized mainland equivalents for head characters are square-bracketed, and in compounds and examples usually supplied within < > marks immediately following the traditional or 旧字形 forms. For this particular entry however any non-mainland forms beyond the head are only found in a duplicate entry in section 8, where the relevant indexical component resembles the second and third strokes of 万 but with the third 丿 stroke having a shorter protrusion at the top, rather than, as with that simplified character entry, found under 殳 and ultimately stemming from the 乂 leading section 9. Anyway, one is obviously able to look up both traditional and simplified forms in this full-size CCD, but only simplified forms in the Simplified edition (the traditional equivalents are however given in the Simplified's entries at least)).

In summary, the CCD might be of interest to (wannabe) lexicographers, especially those of a phonetic component~parsing bent, but I'm not sure what it really has to offer the average student, who will probably be better served by conventional dictionaries (词典) or manuals supplemented by say Harbaugh, or Karlgren (etc). One thing the CCD could definitely do with is an alphabetical index listing the readings > exact page numbers of at least the phonetics/series headers (of which there are as previously noted only about 1,800, so this shouldn't be a total impossibility to compile and add to future editions), as this would provide a very straightforward means of accessing particular phonetics of interest, and their "etymologies" and allied small seal forms, if not the definitions, compounds~phrases, and examples (that is, if there's a character one can't find in the CCD, one has no way of really knowing whether that's due to simply not having hit upon the correct breakdown for indexing, or because the character possibly isn't included in the work). Total stroke count numbers for each phonetic and indeed character entry would be another potentially helpful addition, for productive handwriting skills. It would also be good if the instructions if not system in general could be completely rewritten (made clearer, easier?), and certain parts of the work cut, for example the following from the very first page of the original Preface:

'In most Chinese-English dictionaries characters are arranged according to the sound as written in pinyin and on stroke count, with characters with sounds like a, ai, ang et cetera at the beginning, and characters with sounds like zou, zuo, et cetera at the end. In purely Chinese dictionaries, the arrangement is often based on the radical part of the character. In all cases, however, the result is that characters that have the same phonetic part, and therefore look rather similar, are not grouped together' (my emphasis). All? Pinyin-based alphabetical arrangements will unavoidably group at least some phonetics quite closely together or indeed side by slap-bang side. Look, (M)a!

Lastly, the book is nicely produced, with good quality paper and printing, reasonable binding, and with covers that are thicker (less "curving open"-prone) and thus more durable than some CreateSpace offerings I've seen (though I still covered it with clear adhesive film as the original film was soon starting to lift in places and peel at the edges). The general layout and fonts used are pleasing, and it clearly must've taken a lot of time and effort to collate and format. Dimensions-wise the book is about the same size, thickness and weight as the Pocket Oxford or the Dover reprints of Fred Fangyu Wang's dictionaries.

One can preview most of the front matter on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Chinese-Character-Dictionary-explaining-characters/dp/1491011076/

More book reviews here: https://www.chinese-forums.com/forums/topic/35875-occasional-book-reviews/

 

Footnotes
*The author prefers to use the term series header to phonetic as 'many characters cannot simply be split into a phonetic and radical part' and 'for this reason the term "phonetic" is avoided as much as possible in the Introduction. Instead the more inclusive term "series header" is used' (from the original Preface).

**Similarly, rather than in the MCT repeat the starting page number of each whole section per subdivision, the author could've changed the number each subdivision, to save referring to the section table for the exact further page numbers. One can maybe see what I'm on about here from images on the author's website: http://www.chinesecharacterdictionary.nl/how-to-use-the-sections/ , http://www.chinesecharacterdictionary.nl/main-components-table/

***And sometimes there isn't even a section redirect: suppose for example one was intrigued, while browsing the 从 third subsection of 人 section 10, about what ' 窣 sū / sù see 窸 ' could possibly be about. Even assuming one could make out the 釆 there, which is practically illegible in the printed dictionary due to any 'see ...' linked character being in a font appreciably smaller than the head (or here, "head") preceding it, one would then have to go through the rigmarole of intuiting that 窸 is to be found in the 釆 sixteenth subsection of 木 section 11, and all this just to arrive at the presumably bound compound 窸窣 xīsū (a mere onomatope to describe soft rustling or swishing-like sounds). Is it any wonder that people use apps like Pleco so much nowadays!

****For the purposes of any more detailed comparison, Kanji ABC's 484 graphemes are (allowing for some presumable overlap between the first two of following categories and their respective number of items) drawn from: the historical radicals (198); the Jōyō kanji (284); other kanji (66); and graphemes defined by the authors (57).

[LawrenceHowell 21]

Superbly comprehensive review! And I could read your prose all day.

[Gharial 130]

Heheh, thank you Mr H (and Balthazar, Lu, Luxi, realmayo, 艾墨本, and whoever else might upvote my review!).😍

[Shelley 1,860]

Very comprehensive review, well done.

 

As you mention you are interested in 

7 hours ago, Gharial said:

unusual and possibly innovative indexing systems

 

I wondered if you have come across the Tuttle Chinese Character Fast Finder?

This arranges characters based entirely on shape, no stroke counting and no radicals. You could use this with almost no knowledge of Chinese.

It lists 3,200 character including all HSK levels so very useful for the student.

This might not be your final reference but it helps you identify characters and allows you to do further research.

I found it very useful when I started and can still be very useful.

You can preview some pages here https://www.amazon.co.uk/Mandarin-Chinese-Characters-Fast-Finder/dp/0804849099/ref=dp_ob_image_bk

 

[Gharial 130]

Hi Shelley, how's it hangin'?

 

I remember taking a looksie in certainly the Kanji Fast Finder back when I was in Japan, but reckoned it didn't have enough in it (it's not even a 字典 but just a bare-bones glossary really, and even 字典 become white elephants somewhat if one knows or can closely enough guess the readings necessary to simply jump straight into 词典 (that more Japanese general than kanji dictionaries had radical indexes just in case though! The only one I'm really aware of is the Langenscheidt, which IIRC only total-stroke-count indexes, and then for just the Jōyō)), plus it seemed rather indebted to Halpern's SKIP method (System of Kanji Indexing by Patterns, as used in the Kenkyusha~NTC New J-E Character Dictionary, and the Kodansha Kanji Learner's Dictionary etc: https://www.amazon.com/gp/customer-reviews/R1B69FR745DVQ2 ), and with its (own) apparent inconsistencies (why for example from the CCFF preview pages are 双 and 水 considered acceptable left-right divisions but 从 and 兆 aren't?).

 

Ultimately isn't it just replacing the "pain" of conventional indexing with the "new" (albeit somewhat less intense if not prolonged) pain of scanning? Especially when one will probably need as you say to return to a dictionary proper to really learn enough LOL. And haven't smartphones with their high-tolerance handwriting input made whatever paper-based look-up methods (unless a method has something non-trivial and more widely applicable to say about character decomposition) kind of redundant anyway? 😱🤩

[murrayjames 546]

@LawrenceHowell

 

Quote

Superbly comprehensive review! And I could read your prose all day.

 

As I read the original post I thought, @Gharial writes like someone who needs footnotes. At the bottom of the post, sure enough, the footnotes are there.

 

[Shelley 1,860]

@Gharial its not bad, thank you.

 

I wasn't advocating this method as a one fits all panacea. I merely wanted to enlighten you to a method that does not rely on stroke count OR radicals. As you appear to be perfectly aware of this style I feel as if I have tried to teach my Grandmother to suck eggs and she has explained to me all the intricate methods involved in sucking the perfect egg. 

 

I would like to say that when I was a complete beginner and indeed even now at a more advanced level, I find it very useful. It can help when you aren't sure which component is the radical, especially when there are 2 components that could be radicals or are combined and are actually only one. I don't have a problem discerning which shape category a character falls in to for me this is very clear and straight forward.

Once I have found the pinyin and the tone I can look it up in any of the countless dictionaries I have at my disposal either electronic or paper and fill out my knowledge.

 

I also found your writing very readable not because of footnotes but because of the very liberal and much appreciated use of paragraphs

 

[Gharial 130]

@murrayjames Uh oh, I added a couple more footnotes, hope you don't mind

 

@ Shelley (I couldn't get the @ function to work as there are apparently quite a few Shelleys on C-Fs and your name didn't appear among the ones given): Your bearded new grandmother might give you a complimentary copy of his I mean her revolutionary new dictionary TM (once it's ready), provided you scrape all the floor fluff out of those broken eggs and make hers a nice strong eggnog.

 

Seriously though, that review took several hours per night over more than a week to finish, and there was a fair bit I decided to leave out (or gave up on working out. I'd be better putting the time into my own projects! 😎). And if money were no object I'd probably buy most of Matthews' books (even that one with all the quite involved mnemonics for character meanings and readings including tone).

[Gharial 130]

For what it's worth there are actually a couple of academic reviews of the CCD, one by Zhang Xinming in the vol 2.1 issue (from 2016) of the journal Researching and Teaching Chinese as a Foreign Language (pdf available at http://journals.equinoxpub.com/index.php/RTCFL/article/viewFile/32920/pdf ), the other by Jonathan Webster (a Systemic-Functional linguist at the City University of Hong Kong) in the vol 47 no 1 issue (Jan 2019) of the Journal of Chinese Linguistics (one can find at least excerpts of this latter easily enough online).

 

Webster draws on a few of Zhang's observations but is more critical of the CCD, saying towards his conclusion that 'Van Amstel's priority in creating the CCD was clearly the arrangement of the characters, while the information about each character's meaning along with accompanying examples was clearly secondary in importance'.

 

The same or similar could be said about certainly the indexing system and indeed ordering (as with new methods these are usually one and the same!) in McGraw-Hill's Chinese Dictionary & Guide to 20,000 Essential Words: A New Method for Non-Native Speakers to Look Up the 2,000 Most Commonly Used Characters in Chinese (which I bought a copy of before it increases any more in price LOL).

 

That is, the "Broken Marks" method that it employs may well be the best thing since sliced bread to some (even though it often nearly doubles the count number required - for example, 了 is now 4 marks, presumably 一  丿  l  丶 given those are the only 4 prototypes presented generally, rather than as conventionally two strokes, the first akin to 乛 and the second a 亅 - and there is a lot of scanning involved to find characters when only the leftmost and/or highest mark is taken as the first, primary mark in any group of characters with the same number of total marks, and no explanation given of any possible subordering), but making it the actual means of arranging all the characters in the main body of the work (than making it simply just a featured index) consigns users to an eternal mark-based or (if one prefers and via the supplementary conventional, solely simplified* look-up radical index, or obviously most easily via the Pinyin index) a two-stage look-up process even when they already know the pronunciation of the character(s) involved. But hey, it obviously wouldn't do to have made the Pinyin alphabet the main ordering and the Broken Marks method merely supplementary eh, when the BM Newfangled Method is the whole raison d'etre for the creation and more importantly the marketing of the work.

It's not that this particular McGraw-Hill is a bad book - it's beautifully produced, with excellent-quality paper, a very interesting-looking English translation to Chinese supplementary index, and probably the clearest font I've ever seen (albeit not exactly hard given the A4-size pages! Ken Lunde and Miguel Sousa of Adobe helped with the formatting and developed a special font for especially the Pinyin), and the examples can be amusing (e.g. 孩子们要学习中文, 于是, 傻瓜就去买《汉语断笔码词典》 ShaGua's kids wanted to study Chinese, so he bought the 'Chinese Broken Marks Dictionary'. (ShaGua is a recurring character. Strangely, no Pinyin is provided for the examples, which surely limits the market for this supposedly easier-to-use dictionary! The same applies to the Related Words at the end of each entry, i.e. vocab in which the head character isn't initial, but this is similar to say Harbaugh, and this is probably the better vocab builder of the two)) or seek to impart 'unique cultural tidbits' (e.g. 中国的右翼是自由派, 左翼是保守派; 这与美国不同  In China the right wing is liberal but the left is conservative; this is different from America) - but that the editors disseminate a bit too much misinformation in the Preface to justify their venture.

For instance, the Kangxi (1716) was not 'the very first Chinese dictionary' (so let's not overstate the difficulty of compiling Chinese dictionaries), and there seems little point in saying that only two out of 300-plus students enrolled in Chinese courses at the Miami University of Ohio actively used a Chinese dictionary if it's possibly only paper dictionaries that were the focus of the survey (and what about any potential deficiencies or indeed potential pluses e.g. fantastic textbooks full of plenty of lexicogrammatical detail? of the instruction in the Chinese program there); then there is again the strict avoidance of mentioning any possibility of Pinyin alphabetical-ordered direct look-up or even using things like the 难检字笔画索引 ('Stroke Index for Difficult Characters', which goes by total stroke count) in dictionaries such as the Xinhua Dictionary with English Translation (Commercial Press International, 2000) to find e.g. the character 尹, the surname of three native Chinese with PhDs who'd been tasked by the BM's editors to look up said character by radical in the Xinhua. (They all needed several attempts, and one apparently almost gave up, but that is surely due more to the deficiencies of the decisions of the Xinhua's indexers than to radicals per se. Better and/or bigger conventional dictionaries can obviously opt to list 尹 under more or other than just 乙 and 尸 . To take an "extreme" example, the New Nelson Japanese-English Character Dictionary allows the look up of a character by virtually any conceivable radical thanks to its Universal Radical Index).

 

Lastly, Unicode codes are provided for each simplified head character, e.g. 乡 U+4E61, but as there are only 2000 (i.e. pretty frequent) characters included and most people use IMEs etc there will probably not be much use for this feature generally.

 

I'm no defender of convention (well, not simply for convention's sake), but dictionaries like the CCD and this McGraw-Hill do little to help familiarize students with the vast range of established and useful printed, online and electronic resources. The CCD severely underestimates the difficulties involved in visually decomposing Chinese characters, while the McGraw-Hill severely overstates them, and both systems ironically limit easier access to their contents because they are too wedded to their grapheme-based means of arrangement, as if Chinese had never met or ever been married to an alphabet. All that being said, the McGraw-Hill is by far the easier to use and more comprehensively indexed of the two, which is one good thing at least! 😍

 

*There are however both simplified and traditional broken-marks indices supplied, though the simplified essentially reproduces the ordering of the main text and is thus somewhat superfluous.

 

[Gharial 130]

Just thought I'd post a sample entry from the dictionary I'm writing, that aims to offer more than certainly the ones I reviewed above (and if I may say so myself, the parsing and indexing systems I've developed beat the pants off Van Amstel's, it's literally almost as easy as ABC), but it'll be at least a few years yet before any release.🤪

 

How many takers would there be though for a dictionary like this, that starts from the characters in the Oxford/Commercial Press Concise or Pocket and gives them the good ol' phonetic treatment and more, if priced at hmm...around £20-25? (I'll need to see quite what Createspace say might charge for A4 size and with colour for at least those search string headers).😋

 

If there's not much interest, no worries, I'll just produce it for my own reference and further research purposes! 😎🤣

 

Edit: Uploaded new (and tone-corrected!) screencap that gives each sense its own new line rather than packing them all into a block of text, but whether there'll be space to always do this in the finished product remains to be seen (the extra pages might raise printing costs a bit too much).

 

[Shelley 1,860]

Oh yes much better, really like it. I would be happy to use it now. A simple but effective change

[Tomsima 1,255]

@Gharial Just out of interest, in your screencap 平庸 is written with the pinyin 'pīngyōng'. is this an error or is this a literary reading I haven't studied yet?

(Amazing work on the dictionary, cant even comprehend...!)

[Gharial 130]

Thanks Shelley! Your feedback as a potential user is really appreciated. I'll now run that Cuba and Tom line by you though come publication time.🤩🤑

 

Ooh and thanks also, Tomsima! Keen-eyed corrections like that are really helpful. I guess there's something about the meaning of 平 that keeps throwing my grasp (if it can quite be called that!) of the tone off, even after I've been looking at entries for the compound with 庸. That, or the tone from the entry-focus of  庸 somehow transferred itself back across or something. In future I'll make 100% use of entering hanzi into and copying the resulting Pinyin back from Google than risk typing up the Pinyin myself (but even the Google output sometimes may need slight correcting regarding spacing/word segmentation at least).

 

The really hard work though was the parsing system and the instructions for it (and all the necessary decompositional analyses, possible redirects, etc etc etc), so compiling the actual entries is quite fun in comparison. A rather polysemous entry like 庸 takes about a day (or two, if all the sub-meanings are to cohere well and with a paleographically-motivated, overarching main meaning) to research and draft, but it'll hopefully get quicker as I settle on format, style etc, and there are enough quick entries like 鹌: 鹌鹑(的鹌) - not that I'd quite type it up like that LOL - that the speed sometimes evens out (speeds up) a bit!

 

Thanks again guys, your responses help keep me motivated!🤪

[adrianvan 2]

A short note from me, Adrian, the author or the Chinese Character Dictionary.

First of all I want to express my appreciation to reviewer Gharial for spending so much time and effort in reviewing my book. Reviews like these are priceless for an author, especially if they are self-publishing, because that means there is otherwise very little feedback on the quality of your publication. The same can probably be said for forum managers, for whom well researched reviews must be the life-blood, because what else would people taking part in these discussions talk about if they don't have a starting point like this. It would be like playing tennis without a ball (although even that can be of interest, mostly from an artistic point of view, as shown in the 1966 Antonioni film 'Blowup').

 

Most reviews begin with a sketch of the background of the book, and because the reviewer has omitted this, I would like to begin with a few words about that. As I have explained in the Introduction of the CCD, the book started after I got stuck in my study of Chinese in the winter of 1993-1994. The problem I had run into was that while trying to improve my reading skills, I was unable to find new characters quickly, or review those I had looked up before. With the help of T.K. Ann's 'Cracking the Chinese Puzzle' I managed to create an alternative system, consisting of some 3,500 characters, arranged in three levels: 1. components, consisting of 394 basic elements (356 for the Simplified edition) necessary to identify uniquely about 1800 phonetics; 2. phonetics; 3. characters. The 394 components were derived from the phonetics that Ann had listed in his book.

 

When confronted with the problem of arranging these 394 components in a certain order that would make it possible to locate each of them quickly, I decided to split them first into components featuring horizontal and vertical strokes vs. those with mainly slanting strokes. Then I proceeded with subdividing both halves further, based on some other characteristic feature, like components with a 'foot' bent to the left or right, square-shaped, like 口, 中, 日, 田, 申, etc.. Some components that did not show one of the 16 typical features very clearly were as much as possible allocated to the one that seemed to come closest, like 段 and 𠬝, which were placed in category 5c (representative feature 尸), and 韦, 节, 卜, 下, 丩, 卩, 书, which were all placed in category 13 (representative feature 十). The only feature this last group shares with the representative is obviously the central vertical stroke. It is expected, however, that users of the CCD will note this and probably have not too much difficulty in finding them back when needed.

 

After having created sixteen categories with each having a characteristic feature, and the last one, number 17, for about twenty rather irregular shapes, I went on with arranging the phonetics under the first of their (non-radical) components that could be found in the list, and finally I arranged the characters in series, with each series headed by a phonetic. These were more or less the same as Ann had already given in his book.

 

Anybody who understands the rationale behind the set-up of the book will be able to find any character. The rules do nothing else then summing up this arrangement.

 

The reviewer, however, does not, as he keeps wondering why this or that phonetic should be stripped of its radicals. As an example he mentions 莫 (or 墓, 慕, etc.), and wonders why is it necessary to strip off the top radical. It doesn't seem to make sense from a phonetic point of view, he says. But then he clearly fails to understand the point of splitting characters into components, which – as I pointed out above – is just to create a simple and straightforward system for locating a character between thousands of others, without needing any prior knowledge as to what a phonetic is or how to spot a radical. How can a beginning student of Chinese know that 莫 is a phonetic? S/he can't, so I give them a simple method to find the component (out of 394) under which they can find it (which in this case is '大'). Then they just have to check the list with phonetics of that component to find the phonetic of the character they're looking for, which is indeed 莫. Having found the phonetic, then they can easily find the series with all characters that share this phonetic, like 墓, 慕, 摸, etc..

 

Another example that the reviewer mentions as having had trouble with finding is 卹, and in particular its components卩. As mentioned above, 卩  and a few other components with a vertical line were placed at the end of category 13.

 

The reviewer mentions several other things about the book, that do not work well or should be improved. With some of these I agree, and already have, or will, take appropriate action to remedy them. With others I do not, but they may require better explanation in the book. In practical terms:

 

1. The Introduction has been partly rewritten, until the section titled 'Radicals'. Radicals are problematic, so they need special attention, and that section has not changed much in the latest update. Let me clarify this with an example:

土 in 墓 and in 壁 is a radical, but not in 圼, in which it is part of a phonetic (more accurately, it is a compound ideograph), so an extra rule is needed to help the beginning user of the CCD with making the distinction. The rule is that if 土 stands between diverging strokes, or below two other components, that it should be treated as a radical. This is not scientifically based, but more of a 'rule of thumb', which works well in most cases. The usual approach in standard dictionaries is that 土 can  function as a radical in any position, and so 墓, 壁,  and 圼 can all be found under it. Whether it really should be taken in such dictionaries as a radical in order to find the character involved is a different matter, and I have never found any rules other than the 'trial and error' approach most, including myself, would take when using standard dictionaries. For example, 土 should not be taken as radical in 尘, nor in 墨. By the way, as some readers may have found out for themselves, between dictionaries there are also inconsistencies as to which component should be taken as radical.

 

Why are the rules as I have presented them necessary and important? The aim of the book is to create series with characters that share similar features (i.e. the phonetic), which helps to review characters. Some of the characters I had difficulty with when studying Chinese were 始, 抬, 治, and 胎, which are all more or less frequently used in Chinese newspapers. When encountering – say - 始, I would wonder in which other characters I had seen that same phonetic before, but was unable to find them on the same page in the dictionary where I had found 始. Another example that comes to mind are 勤 (qín, work hard), and 谨 (jĭn, careful). Again, both look very similar to a 3^rd year student, but impossible to find on the same page in any dictionary, let alone to remember.

 

The classic solution to this problem is, as far as I know, not taught anymore. I found it described in the introduction of an early 20^th century Chinese-English dictionary, it may have been Matthews' Chinese-English Dictionary. I remember reading that the author admitted that learning to locate a character was an arduous process. Learning to spot a radical, the author wrote - if I remember well -  consists of studying with a Chinese teacher for many months and learning how to recognize a radical in any arbitrarily given character. I set out in 1994, in my third (!) year of studying Chinese to design my own system, based on my experience as a database programmer, to relieve myself of the burden of breaking my head over how to spot a radical, and of the tediousness of counting strokes in the phonetic part of a character. I didn't know that much about Chinese characters, just that there were phonetics and radicals, and that most radicals are easy to spot, as they are almost always standing at the side, and in the same position: on top, bottom, etc.  of the phonetic. So I wanted to create a system consisting of series of characters, that only differ from others in the same series in having a different radical standing independently at the side of the phonetic, because in that way they are relatively easy to determine, and one can quickly decide which of the remaining components is the first in order.

 

Creating series with the same phonetic is however not a walk in the park, at least not for a part of the characters. It is easy for 始, 抬, 治, and 胎, but not for a character like 觳, in which the radical does not stand at the side, though some might take 殳 as radical, which is not correct in this case. But there is a regularity also in this case, as the radical always stands in the lower left corner, and the rest forms the phonetic. Other characters with in the same series are 毂,彀,and 穀. If you want to avoid having users applying the trial and error method, or to have to study for several months with a Chinese teacher, then you will have to make a rule to guide them to the right series, and teach them that 角 in this case should be taken as a radical, because how are they to know that it is a radical and not a regular component? The other alternative, not making a rule, and placing the character under the first component (i.e. 角), would lead to making a special series with 觳 as header and as only member, which defeats the purpose of the book, which was to group characters with similar phonetics. You can't have your cake and eat it, reviewer, or create a rule, or have a messy system.

 

2. Errors have been corrected, like the component 习 missing from the MCT. However, it would not prevent the user from finding it or one of the other characters in the Character Table headed by 习, like 羽, or 弱, because in all likelihood they – not seeing 习 - would probably go to the Character Table of 𠃌, which is right in front of 习, and from there would without a doubt be able to find 习 and the others. This is one of the advantages of this system, you will find your character eventually, just by using your intuition. In his haste to be critical the reviewer does not seem to be able – or willing – to recognize any advantages like these.

 

Let me finish by summarizing the basic principles and the main advantages of the book, as the reviewer does not have an eye for these:

Basic principle 1: the book aims at arranging characters in series, each series headed by the phonetic the series members have in common.

Basic principle 2: the rules governing the placement of characters into series were aimed at being both simple and straightforward. Many people who have used the book have said they can find most characters fairly quickly.

Main advantage 1: the book makes it possible for users to find any character by following a few simple rules, which can be summarized as: 1. detect the first component, 2. find the phonetic, 3. find the series. This makes for a fast, straightforward and elegant method.

Main advantage 2: the book makes it possible for users to review characters when looking up a new character. For example, if you look up 怡,it is easy to review 始, 抬, 治, and 胎.

The system employed in the book makes it possible to find most characters within 20-30 seconds, faster than with most other systems. With the recently published e-book even faster. See my website www.chinesecharacterdictionary.nl for details, or visit my Amazon author's page: amazon.com/author/adrianvan.

Any further suggestions for how to improve the book will be highly appreciated.

Thanks to everyone for reading this and for any comments.

 

Adrian van Amstel