Recommendation for a English - Chinese Dictionary
Christopher Girsch
Dear all:
I have been studying Chinese for about six months
and I think I am about ready to purchase a good
English - Chinese dictionary. Since I have noted
that it seems that some members of honyaku
speak Chinese language as well, I thought I would
post my question here.
Can anyone out there that speaks English and
Chinese recommend to me a good English -
Chinese dictionary? Right now I only that
and not the other way around.
Ideally, it would be nice if I could order the dictionary
online from Amazon or some other vendor.
Chris Girsch
Matthew Schlecht
*********************************************
Someone on another list posed a similar query last December, so pardon
me while I cut & paste:
ISBN 0-19-596459-4 (ZH<>EN) Oxford Chinese Dictionary (I use this in my
second semester course now, ordered it directly from Oxford Univ. Press
www.oup.com)
ISBN 962 07 0060 0 (EN>ZH) A New English Chinese Dictionary (quite good
coverage, but no pinyin)
ISBN 7-80052-242-3 (EN>ZH) A Practical English Chinese Dictionary (provides
good contexts and usages, and pinyin)
There are also some good online resources, if you want those I can post
them.
HTH, Matthew Schlecht
Christopher Girsch
>
> There are also some good online resources, if you want those I can post
>them.
Thank you Matthew,
Would you kindly post those online resouces?
There is so much to learn...and the pronunciation is so hard to master!
But it sure is fun to learn!
Chris
Matthew Schlecht
From: "Christopher Girsch" <cpgi...@nifty.com>
To: <hon...@googlegroups.com>
*************************************
Yes, tones will be the death of me yet!
Now, I find when I read Japanese, my mind's voice is starting to
pronounce the kanji in Mandarin, too. I'll need to work harder at
compartmentalizing.
When it gets bad, I just feel thankful I'm not learning Cantonese, with
twice the number of tones.
Good EN>ZH sites are:
http://www.tigernt.com/cgi-bin/ecdict.cgi
http://www.okdaily.com/go/svc/ecdict.html
http://alternativehealing.org/BioChem_Dictionary.htm (biochem)
http://www.esaurus.org/ (medical)
HTH, Matthew Schlecht
Kirill Sereda
other direction (that is, first learning Chinese, then Japanese) is probably
the best way. The kun'yomi of a kanji, if there is a kun'yomi, can be
neatly separated off as a special additional case, and the on'yomi, in most
cases, can be easily deduced from the original Chinese pronunciation. In
90% of the cases, knowing how a particular hanzi is pronounced in Chinese
helps one easily imagine its Japanese on'yomi without looking it up in the
dictionary. On the other hand, it is almost impossible to precisely guess a
Chinese pronunciation from a Japanese one:
Chinese --> Japanese: high confidence
Japanese --> Chinese: very low confidence
k
Mark Spahn
Matthew Schlecht
From: Mark Spahn
To: hon...@googlegroups.com
Sent: Wednesday, October 11, 2006 9:01 AM
Subject: Re: Re: Recommendation for a English - Chinese Dictionary
An idea for Chinese-learners*...
Maybe the tones of Chinese phrases can be associated with
well known song phrases, such as "Mary had a little lamb".
I wonder whether Chinese song-lyric writers are
constrained by the tones of the language,
like Shakespeare is constrained by the 14-line sonnet format.
If this idea has any merit, you can come out with a (money-making?)
CD of traditional and up-to-date snatches of song associated
with Chinese phrases.
-- Mark Spahn @ "Learn Chinese Thru Hip-Hop"
*Why the hyphen? To denote the tone:
a "Chinese learner" is a Chinese who is learning something;
a "Chinese-learner" is somone who is learning Chinese
(not the difference in tone, even in English).
*******************************
I brought up the issue of Chinese tones in songs with our teacher. It
seemed to me that tonality and melody would be in frequent conflict. Her
answer was that the tones give way, and it is the context that secures
meaning in the song lyrics, or sometimes creates an artistic ambiguity.
Given that we are at the "elementary stage" of learning the language,
our teacher has taught us some schoolkid songs, playing tapes to help us get
the hang of it. The tones tend to be more evident when these little kids
sing, since their adherence to melody is about as good as most schoolkids
around the world. It comes across as more like "rap".
It's hard to imagine a melody that would be tonally correct for more
than a few verses, but with the skill of a Bard, I'm sure it could happen.
Matthew Schlecht
Matthew Schlecht
From: "Kirill Sereda" <kvse...@worldnet.att.net>
To: <hon...@googlegroups.com>
Sent: Wednesday, October 11, 2006 3:01 AM
Subject: RE: Re: Recommendation for a English - Chinese Dictionary
Interestingly, Matthew, if one wants to learn both languages, going in the
other direction (that is, first learning Chinese, then Japanese) is probably
the best way. The kun'yomi of a kanji, if there is a kun'yomi, can be
neatly separated off as a special additional case, and the on'yomi, in most
cases, can be easily deduced from the original Chinese pronunciation. In
90% of the cases, knowing how a particular hanzi is pronounced in Chinese
helps one easily imagine its Japanese on'yomi without looking it up in the
dictionary. On the other hand, it is almost impossible to precisely guess a
Chinese pronunciation from a Japanese one:
Chinese --> Japanese: high confidence
Japanese --> Chinese: very low confidence
k
********************************
You're probably quite right about this, but it's too late to change the
order of my learning stages (!).
I concur about the correlations between on'yomi and hanzi
pronunciation. I occasionally try to develop Grimm-type sound
correspondences in my mind, but it is so far just a hobby. I also
occasionally forget a hanzi pronunciation and try substituting an on'yomi in
Chinese class, which results in a look from the teacher something like "what
part of China did you come from?".
My pet theory is that Japanese on'yomis came from a more Southern
(non-Mandarin) dialect, although not as disparate as Cantonese.
Sound correspondences aside, my take so far is that the meaning
correspondence between kanji compounds and hanzi compounds is ~80%. Even
though preferred usages are different, each side can get the gist of what
the other side has written.
Matthew
James Sparks
> My pet theory is that Japanese on'yomis came from a more Southern
> (non-Mandarin) dialect, although not as disparate as Cantonese.
It's my understanding that the on'yomi came from a wide range of
Chinese dialects, from Mandarin to Cantonese. My inlaws speak a form of
Cantonese (Toisanese, a virtually unpronounceable dialect, unless you
were born there or have a serious speech impediment), and they
frequently say words that I can readily understand from my knowledge of
Japanese. Similarly, my Mandarin-speaking friends often say words whose
meaning is clear to me. The same goes for friends from Shanghai and
elsewhere.
Just one example of a Mandarin-derived word is gyoza, which is guo tieh
in Mandarin (or kuo tieh), but wok-hep (yes, THAT wok) down south. You
can usually tell where a yomi came from by its, well, yomi.
It makes sense that this would be the case. I mean, it's not like
kanji were imported to Japan as one big crate of scrolls by a single
priest. They immigrated over a long period, with people from all over
China.
James Sparks
Benjamin Barrett
the region the pronunciation is from. It's typically given as one of the
characters 古漢呉唐慣 in a まる next to the 漢字 entry.
Excerpt from 大漢語林:
古音 - Rare. Really old pronunciations starting in the fifth century.
漢音 - Pronunciations from the Nara to Heian, based on 長安地方 (current
西安) during the 隋 and 唐 dynasties.
呉音 - Pronunciations from before 漢音, from the 長江下流地域.
唐音 - Pronunciations from the Muromachi to the Edo period, from the 江
南, 浙江, 南京, 福州 areas.
慣用音 - Pronunciations developed in Japan based on errors.
BTW, although somewhat old, now, I went looking for a basic E>C
dictionary several years ago. The best one I found for daily
conversation type words is English-Chinese (Pinyin) Pocket Dictionary,
published by Hippocrene Books in New York. The paperback version came
out in 1996, the original in 1988.
Benjamin Barrett
a cyberbreath for language life
livinglanguages.wordpress.com
Jon Babcock
>> From: "Kirill Sereda" <kvse...@worldnet.att.net>
>>
>> The kun'yomi of a kanji, if there is a kun'yomi, can be neatly
>> separated off as a special additional case, and the on'yomi, in
>> most cases, can be easily deduced from the original Chinese
>> pronunciation. In 90% of the cases, knowing how a particular hanzi
>> is pronounced in Chinese helps one easily imagine its Japanese
>> on'yomi without looking it up in the dictionary.
> I concur about the correlations between on'yomi and hanzi
> pronunciation.
A Cautionary Note:
In my case, knowing Chinese before learning Japanese did convey two
benefits, but the first comes with too high a price.
1) Some ability to guess ON readings.
Disregarding tone, I count about 416 syllables in the Concordance des
romanisations pinyin et wade in the excellent _Grand dictionnaire Ricci
de la langue chinoise_, 2001. A rough count of the ON index to the
廣漢和辭典 (a revised, four volume, edition of the big Morohashi, 1982)
yielded a little less than 350 syllables. If we include tone, Mandarin
has potentially about 1660 tone-differentiated syllables available, but
in practice about 1300 are actually used.
The many thousands of polysyllabic Chinese words imported into Japanese
over the centuries, although clearly differentiated by their kanji, are
represented in sound by 350 tone-less Japanese syllables. So, yes, it's
easier to pick one of those 350, informed by a Mandarin syllable along
with its tone, than to pick the correct tone-embedded Mandarin syllable
from the 1300, informed by the Japanese ON. This can be useful in
looking up kanji in a phonetically arranged Japanese dictionary.
But, as James Sparks and Matthew Schlecht have noted (and now Benjamin
Barret, too, in some detail), virtually none of current ON represent
today's Mandarin reading. They represent the pronunciation of those
Chinese syllables in other 'dialects' as spoken in centuries long past.
Mandarin takes second place to other dialects as a tool for guessing ON.
In my case, the poor fit of Mandarin for this task ended up complicating
my study of Japanese. It has proven very difficult for me to remember
the real Japanese pronunciation of many of these "Chinese" words. I
usually get them kind of right, but not right.
Take 簡単. In pinyin this is jiandan. In other words, the second
syllable begins with what looks like a 'd'. So I pronounce the Japanese
'kandan'. Wrong! But looks are deceiving. Wade-Giles had it closer. In
Wade-Giles it's romanized as jian-tan. The unvoiced, unaspirated initial
of the second syllable now looks more like the Japanese ON, tan. So if
my Mandarin pronunciation were spot on, I would pronounce it closer to the
Japanese. Okay, but having the two transliterations in mind, only
compounds my confusion.
Thinking pinyin 'd' and ON 't' can be swapped, I see something like 団
体 (J. dantai), pinyin tuanti. I pronounce it dandai. Wrong! Here the
't' of tuan goes to 'd', but the 't' of ti stays as a 't'. Of course we
must add an 'a' to ti to get tai, and subtract the 'u' from the tuan to
get tan, I mean, dan. ! This is just one example and there are dozens
more. Confusion reigns supreme.
About the only thing I've found I can take to the bank, is that the
final Mandarin -ng will most often be represented as a long vowel in ON.
E.g., 唐 tang --> tou, 張 zhang --> chou, etc.
So when my daughter, a graduate student in Chinese, asked about taking
Japanese, I said, "Go ahead. But don't make my mistake. Just memorize,
memorize, and do not try to apply your knowledge of Chinese characters
at all for the first two years."
2) A wide acquaintance with the *meanings* of a significant portion of
the kanji of current Japanese.
I knew the meanings of about 94% of the "essential" 1006 kanji from the
1945 常用漢字 and, if simplifications were not counted, 97%. I knew
something about (i.e., the meaning and/or Mandarin reading) of a little
less than half of the 284 kanji additions for proper names. As the
repertoire is extended the percentages drop, but even looking at the
6000 plus JIS level 1 and level 2 kanji, I would guess that I already
knew the meanings of about 40% when I began studying Japanese at age 45.
Often, knowing the meaning of kanji from Chinese helped me to understand
the meaning of Japanese words faster than listening to the occasionally
contorted and sometimes incorrect explanations of my teachers in
English. In this arena, knowing Chinese characters helped, but as soon
as I got them in mind they would begin to defeat any hope of remembering
the proper Japanese pronunciation.
Jon
--
Jon Babcock
Matthew Schlecht
From: "James Sparks" <jsp...@alamedanet.net>
To: <hon...@googlegroups.com>
*******************************
Well, it's an inchoate pet theory at best, I guess.
What you say makes a lot of sense, that the hanzi=>kanji importation
took place over a long period and from numerous sources. My understanding,
though (waiting to be falsified), is that the initial bulk came over with
Buddhism in the middle of the first millennium from a central Eastern
coastal region.
I've noticed in a few cases that my mother-in-law (Mandarin Chinese
monolingual) will understand the Japanese onyomi pronunciation of some
things, which I had reverted to in the past out of necessity, such as my
'denwa' for 'dianhua' (telephone) and 'isha' for 'yisheng' (doctor),
although in the latter case some of the similarity is coincidental. In some
cases, we have also communicated in writing!
Matthew Schlecht
James Sparks
> In some cases, we have also communicated in writing!
Hey, I traveled around China and communicated solely by writing. I
would get the strangest stares from people who couldn't understand how I
could read and write Chinese (sort of) but couldn't understand a spoken
word.
BTW, Matthew, when you post, you are somehow putting your messages in
way that they only show up as quoted portions at the GG website, so a
reader has to click a link to "show quoted text" to read your message.
Go to the website and you will see what I mean. It doesn't happen every
time, but happened twice in this thread.
James Sparks
Matthew Schlecht
From: "James Sparks" <jsp...@alamedanet.net>
To: <hon...@googlegroups.com>
Sent: Wednesday, October 11, 2006 2:40 PM
Subject: Re: Recommendation for a English - Chinese Dictionary
>
I see what you mean.
Does anybody know how to turn off this annoyingly helpful feature?
Matthew Schlecht