Pocket Oxford Chinese Dictionary

By: Manser, Martin H.

Book Overview

An essential reference both for English-speakers learning Chinese and Chinese-speakers learning English, this brand new edition of the Pocket Chinese Dictionary offers authoritative, up-to-the-minute coverage, with over 88,000 words and phrases, and 130,000 translations, in a compact and practical format.
This brand new edition has been updated to include the very latest vocabulary, including bioterrorism, e-shopping, WAP phone, domain name, and SARS.
The dictionary's clear layout makes it accessible and straightforward to use, and a detailed index system of radicals helps you find the entry you need quickly and easily. Chinese simplified characters, orthodox characters, and pinyin forms are given for each entry. Entries are ordered alphabetically according to their pinyin romanization, and coverage of Mandarin tones is included.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0195968336
• ISBN13: 9780195968330
• Release Date: May 2004
• Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
• Length: 614 Pages
• Weight: 1.70 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.8" x 7.7" x 5.1"

Customer Reviews

Excellent Dictionary

I am learning disabled and this dictionary has not seen a lot of use as yet. It is the dictionary my language teacher suggests.

Read carefully...

This is not a pocket dictionary. This is a serious hard cover dictionary with more than 90 000 entries. I was able to find any tricky Chinese vocabulary here inside. Giving 5 stars.

The dictionary I recommend automatically.

I owed the previous edition of this Dictionary which I would have found very useful if it wasn't for the extremely tiny print they used. This new edition has got large print (easy to read) so it fulfills all my needs. Entries in simplied and traditional (although they forgot the traditional letters in some of the example sentences), pinyin accompanies most of the Chinese items (again they forgot to add the pinyin of the example sentences). But, summing up I'd recommend that dictionary to any student interested on undertaking Chinese seriously. The ratio quality/price is simply unbeatable.

Useful, but not pushing the barriers

This is a great dictionary, big enough to accommodate a reasonable font size (unlike various previous Oxford Chinese Dictionaries) but small enough (A5) to fit into a small bag. I'd definitely complement this dictionary with the Chinese Character Fastfinder (0804836345) by Laurence Matthews, as there is really no way of finding a character in this dictionary if you don't know it's pronunciation and are unfamiliar with the radical index. This dictionary is very similar to the Concise English-Chinese Chinese-English Dictionary, which is also from Oxford, red, and approximately the same size. The 3rd edition of this volume (0195911512 being the 2nd edition) has many new technological and scientific words). Some ideas for a future edition: 1) Make the most common disyllabic entry bold so that it can be memorised as a locator for "AB de A" or "AB de B" questions to identify characters (i.e. happy - gaoxing, if this is the most common word under "gao" then it should be made bold, which will enable us to memorise "gaoxing de gao ma?" 2) Include a section on stroke order rules, such as in Hadamitzky and Spahn's Kanji & Kana (0804820775).

Excellent dictionary

Very good dictionary. Tons of entries. Other reviews were a little unfair. I'm not sure how you can say there are fewer than 100,000 words when it states on the cover there are 220,000 (click book image for enlarged version and see for yourself), did the reviewer count them? Also, I wonder whether another reviewer that had trouble finding words was having trouble with the language rather than the dictionary. It has taken me a while to get the nack of looking up words in pinyin, it's not quite alphabetical. It's alphabetic by initial (the first syllable? kind of? still learning) and then ordered by tone (or maybe it's vice versa!). Many words are there, just not where you'd expect them going purely by the alphabet. I am about to order a second dictionary so my wife and I can both have one! Right now we have to take turns and it slows us down trying to study! My only qualm with it at all is that example phrases seem to be all in Chinese characters, not pinyin. The starter edition of the Oxford dictionary is better for phrases (or get a dedicated phrase book). Having the phrases in characters is a feature I hope to grow into.