A Frequency Dictionary of Mandarin Chinese: Core Vocabulary for Learners

Routledge Frequency Dictionaries

by Richard Xiao, Paul Rayson, Tony McEnery

A Frequency Dictionary of Mandarin Chinese is an invaluable tool for all learners of Mandarin Chinese, providing a list of the 5,000 words and the 2,000 Chinese characters (simplified) most commonly used in the language. Based on a fifty-million-word corpus composed of spoken, fiction, non-fiction and news texts in current use, the dictionary provides the user with a detailed frequency-based list, as well as alphabetical and part-of-speech indexes. All entries in the frequency list feature the English equivalent and a sample sentence with English translation. The Dictionary also contains thirty thematically organized lists of frequently used words on a variety of topics such as food, weather, travel and time expressions. A Frequency Dictionary of Mandarin Chinese enables students of all levels to maximize their study of Mandarin vocabulary in an efficient and engaging way. It is also an excellent resource for teachers of the language. A CD version is available to purchase separately. Designed for use by corpus and computational linguists it provides the full text in a format that researchers can process and turn into suitable lists for their own research work.

400 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2009

About the author

Richard Xiao is a researcher at the Department of Linguistics and English Language, Lancaster University, UK.

Reviews

[Richard Pohl · Rating 5 out of 5]

Absolutely awesome. You better buy this book (also e-book available) right now. It helped me immensely during my studies. You can also combine it with some e-learning flashcards tools (like Skritter) and writing sheets (like those produced by Hanzigrids or E-stroke) to train your skills. I love the example sentences, various topic lists, character lists... a must buy for any Chinese learner.

[Marcin · Rating 1 out of 5]

Good book but very bad quality/resolution of print making it unusabale for around 30% of the characters. The example sentences are also missing the pinyin so not very useful for intermediate learners.

[Matthew Borton · Rating 2 out of 5]

Poor editing. Poor example sentences.

Would be useful only to me for the frequency list in order; however, I have abandoned it favoring the HSK lists and using hackchinese.com.