Dictionaries??

[Alveranter]

I don't know if this is a stupid question, but the Chinese-English (for instance) dictionaries.. what are they like? is there any system for looking up words in chinese? From english to chinese shouldn't be a problem.. but reverse?

[skylee]

There are usually two ways to arrange the characters. One is by alphabeticall order of Hanyu Pinyin. The other is by radical and then number of strokes.

I know there are other methods of indexing but they are not popular.

[Nina]

As an English-speaking person myself, looking up Chinese characters by their stroke count always had me completely baffled! I'd try to count the strokes, but then I'd have to go through lots of characters before I realized that I had the wrong stroke count.

The only thing that saved my poor Western-thinking mind was finding the pin-yin spellings of the characters. At least that narrowed down the playing field. But most Chinese isn't written in pin-yin. What to do?

I guess if you want to read Chinese, you'd have to learn to write Chinese first. There are some basic strokes used in all the characters, and once you learn them, it's easier to look up the characters by their stroke count.

If there's a specific text you're trying to translate, then I'd suggest trying to find it in the characters as well as the pin-yin spellings, then use an on-line dictionary to look each of them up. Or you could buy a software program, like Wenlin, then download the characters into the program.

I'm just a novice at this, but I do try to help if I can.

-Nina