Chinese Characters: A Genealogy and Dictionary

List Price: $19.95 Discount Price: $17.00

Customer Reviews:

Worthless [Posted on 2007-12-03]
I'm at a real loss as to how this book rated such good reviews. It's possible that it is a good book but I can't tell because the printing is VERY tiny. You would either need the vision of a Barn Owl or a really big magnifying glass just to make out the characters. It's going back tomorrow.

Chinese charactr search made easy [Posted on 2008-02-20]
Chinese Characters: A Geneology and Dictionary makes searching for Chinese words easy. The author, Rick Harbaugh, has included six indexes
to help the scholar and learner in what has often been a long, and sometimes futile, search through traditional Chinese dictionaries.
The use of the radical index had been the only option if the pronunciation of the word is unknown.

Harbaugh includes the traditional radical index, a stroke index, a pronunciation index, an English-to-Chinese index, a Chinese index, and an index using the Bopomofo phonetic system.

The dictionary itself is structured around the radical system; all words
derived from the same radical are presented in a geneological tree.
Word combinations, bound forms, are then listed and explained.

Pinyin romanization is used throughout.

I highly recommend Chinese Characters: A Genealogy and Dictionary.
I wish this book had been available when I began my study of Chinese many years ago.

Unique tool [Posted on 2008-03-09]
A unique tool for searching chinese characters for foreign language students. It's easy to read. The book includes all the possible ways of looking for words: by English entries, by Chinese sounds, by stroke counting, by stroke order. The body of the dictionary is designed to illustrate how Chinese characters are actually constructed starting from radicals.

Excellent tool [Posted on 2008-04-04]
I'm studying chinese language for 2 years now, have some conventional dictionaries and use internet for help me learning. After several months of using [...] as my prefered online dictionary to get definitions, and character genealogy, I bought this excellent book that has very clever indexes to find the information using the sounds, character components, pinyin, english meaning, stroke count, radical, etc. It is a great help for learning. Great work !

Unique. Very helpful. Not intended as etymologic. [Posted on 2008-05-21]
If you want to learn the signs along their shape, take this book.
The book describes todays state of the signs, and their internal relations.

As somebody of the reviewers said: "this editor fell prey to the seductive charm of cute graphic stories"
Yes, and intentionally so. This book is for learning todays signs, gives relations and sometimes what is called "folk etymology", to make learning easier. If you are a sinologist, who wants to know how the signs developed diachronically, this book isn't for you. You dont need it in the first place, because you know all the signs already.

I hope this distinction: structure of todays signs vs hard core sinology & etymology is helpful.

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