What Character Is That?: An Easy-Access Dictionary of 5,000 Chinese Characters

I have rarely seen anything as over-hyped as this. It really looks like the reviews are all written by the family!
And what an amateurish production: No proper pinyin font - absence of 1st tone markers, a complete jumble of pages - introductions appear half way through the book, pages are numbered in the most haphazard way - it is clear that this has been amended and amended in paper form without any proper editing or electronic help.
From my point of view, another problem is that the simplified characters have clearly been grafted on later, but I have found it useful to look up traditional characters.
Mind you, all you get is a very short meaning - you may well then need to take the pinyin and look up in another dictionary.
I bought this near the beginning of my chinese studies and I did find it helpful and somewhat charming.

Useful but far from perfect (3/3 people found this helpful)

I bought this book after I read the favourable reviews on this page, but after using it for a week I'm a bit disappointed. Since I've been studying japanese for several years now, I wanted a Chinese character dictionary similar to "Kodansha's Kanji Dictionary", where you can easily find any Japanese character by a unique method.

Unfortunately this book couldn't be more different and, although useful, lacks several items I expected to be present in such a dictionary:

1- The most cumbersome point is that you have to learn by heart the somewhat arbitrary English names given to the radicals in order to find a character. This method is time-consuming and severely limits the potential of this book. I would suggest other methods, such as the one used by Kodansha or other Kanji dictionaries.

2- The whole layout is a bit clumsy and I had a hard time trying to figure out where the radical lists ended and the dictionary part began. Although there are a small number of exercises scattered across the book to help the beginner, I found them annoying for someone interested in just looking for a character.

3- There's no list of characters arranged by pronunciation, which means you can only use this dictionary to read written texts, but not to write them.

4- The typography is probably the worst part, since the author has apparently been unable to download pinyin fonts from the Internet. In fact, he frankly admits this: "accent for the first tone (the horizontal bar) is missing in the dictionary, because such accent is missing in our keyboard." (!!!)

5- It would be nice to find some example vocabulary with each character to avoid using a complementary dictionary all the time.

As I said, the book is useful and so far is the only Chinese dcitionary I own with the basic 5000 characters, in both traditional and simplified versions, but I find it can be easily improved. A new edition will be a great idea.

Useful but far from perfect (11/11 people found this helpful)

Unfortunately this book couldn't be more different and, although useful, lacks several items I expected to be present in such a dictionary:

3- There's no list of characters arranged by pronunciation, which means you can only use this dictionary to read written texts, but not to write them.

5- It would be nice to find some example vocabulary with each character to avoid using a complementary dictionary all the time.

As I said, the book is useful and so far is the only Chinese dcitionary I own with the basic 5000 characters, but I find it can be easily improved. A new edition will be a great idea.

A useful reference (2/3 people found this helpful)

This book is quite a good reference to Chinese characters. You use the english names of the radicals to look up the characters in the book. It works well in conjunction to a regular chinese<>english dictionary as well as the traditional stroke-numbered character dictionaries.

excellent (34/41 people found this helpful)

traditional and simplified characters arranged by radical in english, according to complexity ie number of strokes - wow, what a find! a great supplementary book for beginners to intermediate esp for those of us who get fed up with pin-yin dictionaries where the structure of the character takes second place to the pronunciation. the author aims to present a few thousand of the most popular charachers and does a pretty good job. though mandarin only, it's a bit easier to use than rita choy's book (the latter also has cantonese pronunciations but beware her mandarin is without tones!). Go's book is also for those who might be a bit overwhelmed by the extensiveness of defrancis' "geneology" dictionary (also excellent). it's no surprise that oxford has "nicked" the idea in their new "simple" chinese dictionary of presenting the written structure of characters alongside the pin-yin word order. strongly recommend.

What Character Is That?: An Easy-Access Dictionary of 5,000 Chinese Characters

Ping-gam Go

Reader Reviews:

An overhyped hotch potch amateurish but charming (10/10 people found this helpful)

Useful but far from perfect (3/3 people found this helpful)

Useful but far from perfect (11/11 people found this helpful)

A useful reference (2/3 people found this helpful)

excellent (34/41 people found this helpful)

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