So, you are studying Chinese. Part of your learning involves reading and writing, and maybe some sense of how to pronounce Chinese characters. Yet, you are encountering great difficulties in tackling so complex and alien a language and grammar, and at the same time are progressing, but only very slowly. You decide you need to invest in some learning aid – a dictionary of some sort, not just the ordinary, 800 page tome, but something that would really aid you in speedily picking up Chinese, while at the same time remaining as the work of reference a dictionary should be.
Perhaps some years ago this may have been irresolvable, and often learning a language like Mandarin would have required a prodigious memory, or a specific learning method. But what if one wanted to learn Chinese the traditional way, with reliance on a dictionary for the memorisation of hundreds of thousands of characters? The best answer would be an Chinese-English electronicdictionary.
The Downsides of Conventional Dictionaries
Well firstly, things operate much more quickly in electronic form. Using a conventional Chinese dictionary to search for characters can often be a highly tedious and time-consuming process – unlike other languages, such as German or French, which use a Romanised script, Chinese characters are organised within a dictionary by "radical," a defining feature shared by a group of Chinese characters.
Thus, poring through a passage of Chinese text, for anyone trying to rote-learn hundreds of Chinese characters, requires two searches – one of the word's radical in the radical index, and then the word itself. This can be a very slow and troublesome process, particularly if one makes mistakes in radical recognition. A small passage of Chinese, thus, may take up to an hour to read. Moreover, even if one does use Victor Mair's hanyupinyin method, there will always be the problem of having to learn hundreds of thousands of alien-looking Chinese characters – and conventional book methods often demand lots of patience and rugged determination.
Moreover, conventional dictionaries can be cumbersome to transport – often being several hundreds of pages long, and in the case of real reference tomes (there are after all 50,000 Chinese characters) transportation or portability is probably out of the question. For the modern day student of Chinese, of the quick and easy information age, conventional dictionaries may be too long-winded to reference, and are furthermore troublesome to move around.
The Benefits of Electronic Dictionaries
Electronic dictionaries don't just cater to Chinese, of course. There are many other languages that can be programmed into one electronic dictionary alone, depending on the model; for the student of Chinese it is the ease of access that is most appealing. Instead of poring through pages of radical index and characters, electronic dictionaries store all the linguistic data in a machine that can, depending on the model, more or less be used in the palm of the hand. First and foremost, the electronic dictionary is eminently portable.
As to utility, the biggest advantage of being electronic is that the reference is instantaneous – the radical indices and character lists will still be there, but will be accessible through buttons and folders, rather than tedious lists on the written page.
Of course the degree of ease of access differs across different models. The best, however, which may set you back up to US$300, may include touch-screens, which renders the process of word searching something akin to talking to the dictionary. On the BESTA CD-516S, for instance, one can actually write the character on the interface, dispensing with tedious radical searches. Moreover, it provides phrases – such as the chengyu four-character phrases – and idioms associated with that character.
The CD-516S also contains many different dictionaries, so while some provide only the word, others use the word in a sentence to further explain its meaning and usage. Thus, top-notch electronic dictionaries not only contain whole dictionaries of vocabulary in a palm-sized gadget, but also allow the user to access individual characters much more quickly, almost instantaneously. Using the touch-screen to "write" the character, for instance, easily quadruples the speed of reading.
Of course, to invest in something like the BESTA CD-516S, at around US$ 300, would require some thought, although there are many lower notch models, from US$100. BESTA remains one of the few quality brands in Chinese electronic dictionaries. Moreover, to invest in a full-blown thousand page Chinese-English tome would easily set you back a few hundreds of dollars. For anyone serious about pursuing Chinese, electronic dictionaries are highly recommended for their portability, and the ease of access they provide to a world of thousands of unintelligible Chinese characters.
Marcus Chin - I write about various things, and in the main out of that simple human emotion - interest and, correspondingly, passion. Knowledge stems ...
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