Chinese Characters: A Genealogy and Dictionary

by Rick Harbaugh

This dictionary is designed to help students understand, appreciate and remember Chinese characters. Charts show how each part of the more than 4000 characters in the dictionary can be traced back to about 200 simple pictographs and ideographs. Every character entry includes a brief traditional Chinese etymology based on the Shuowen Jiezi and commentaries on it that date back nearly 2000 years. Simplified forms for each character are given, though the dictionary is structured around traditional forms.

Genres: China, Reference, Nonfiction, Language, Dictionaries

544 pages, Paperback

First published August 1, 1998

Reviews

[Daniel · Rating 5 out of 5]

I've been using this book since the first days I studied Chinese. It is absolutely key to a good understanding of the characters. It helps you to understand and therefore memorize characters, learn the phonetics of many of the character elements etc. I was also able to get used to both simplified and traditional characters because of this book.
Of course, it is not necessary to buy this book. You can just go to zhongwen.com.

[Femmy · Rating 4 out of 5]

In 2003-2004 my joining the tjersil mailing list rekindled my love for wuxia novels and television series, and through the serial-silat mailing list, I was lucky enough to obtain the soundtracks to my favorite series from the 80s. Then I scrambled to find a Chinese-English dictionary on the net so that I can translate the lyrics. I was just dying to know what they mean.

In my search, I stumbled into www.zhongwen.com and immediately fell in love with the organization of their dictionary. Not only you can search for words by their radical, but you can also search by any component of the character that you know.

For example, if you want to know what the meaning of Jing (靖)from the name Guo Jing (Kwee Ceng) and you know that the right component means "green", you can just look up this word (青) instead and trace the word "jing" from there, and voila! It means "tranquil" (an apt name for Guo Jing, don't you think?).

Anyway, then I found out from the site that they've published the paper version of the dictionary, so I went to Amazon and bought it, and my husband and I still consult it from time to time whenever the need arises.

[James · Rating 4 out of 5]

An excellent and compact dictionary, that while not by any means comprehensively covering every Chinese character, cover many common ones and compounds. The unique feature of this dictionary enables the user to chart the historical development of the character from its ancient origin to its present form. Also, the dictionary while printed using traditional-form characters, not only gives simplified variants, but also gives a guide to usage when characters or words differ in usage on the Mainland or in Taiwan.

[Thế Chiến Lê · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is an awesome book, I'm looking for it. Any one here have the electric edition of it?

[Jamie · Rating 5 out of 5]

I’m paying it forward, because a good review helped me select this edition when I was browsing ebay for “best Mandarin dictionary.” They said the genealogy was indispensable, as well as the multiple indexes, and they were correct. I keep my little pocket dictionary as an adorable supplement, and between the two of them, I’m well set.

[Jason G · Rating 5 out of 5]

I carried this book around Taiwan for months until it almost fell apart.

The best thing about this dictionary is that you can look up characters by their phonetic components in addition to the traditional radical. I found this a much more efficient way to organize a Chinese dictionary. To illustrate, if you are trying to lookup 灘 in a Chinese dictionary and you do not know the correct pronunciation (tān), with a traditional Chinese dictionary you would have to look up the water radical, count the strokes (19) and then wade through hundreds of other characters with the same radical. With this dictionary you can look up 難, a common word that means difficult, and you will find there are only three other characters with this phonetic component - much easier!

Although this dictionary does have simplified characters, it is organized by the traditional characters and that would be a disadvantage to anyone not interested in learning the traditional forms of the characters.

[Qubitng · Rating 5 out of 5]

The traditional way of ordering Chinese characters is so woefully inadequate and antiquated. It is so much easier to find the character you want using this dictionary. The typography is very nice and easy on my eyes.

The online version is a very handy supplement because you can click on any Chinese character in the entry and it will take you there (no more looking in the indices). Additionally the associated etymology tree is right there underneath (not on the next page or 3 pages back). Additionally for each character there is a link to the Cantonese pronunciation (.wav file) as well as various other dictionaries/db.

[johanna asterisk · Rating 2 out of 5]

i have learned frustration from this book ...

[Riobhcah · Rating 5 out of 5]

In this one the Chinese characters are actually big enough to see without too much trouble! It is a very helpful character dictionary.