Use and Abuse of Dictionaries

[woodcutter]

Split from here

Why use a dictionary, in general? I always take pains seek out stuff that has translations provided, or at least translations of the difficult words. That way I don't have to spend hours and hours of my life leafing through pages of a dictionary. Which is especially painful if the language happens to be Chinese!

I often wonder why people are so fond of studying with a newspaper too. It is bound to be full of unusual (and fairly useless) names and terms which will befuddle the student.

All in all, one of those language learning textbooks, which they designed to help you learn, would seem a better bet. OK, the stuff Roddy lists is more interesting. For me though, the fun wears off soon after flapping through the dictionary a couple of times. Especially if the jokes ain't funny.

[roddy]

I guess one of the reasons was that I have always had a massive amount of available material in Chinese only, with very little with translation or vocab lists attached. Even if you do have a translation, knowing which parts of the two texts relate to each other isn’t always easy. Plus, I think looking up new vocab in the dictionary gives you more feel for the way a word is used, and helps you make connections you might not make otherwise – I know I had plenty of ‘Ah, it’s the A in AB and CA’ moments’ as pieces of the Chinese puzzle fell into place this way.

Having said that, there’s only so many hours you can pore over the tiny script of the little red dictionary before your eyes turn the same colour.

[in_lab]

Hey Woodcutter, I agree that flipping through a dictionary wastes a lot time. And especially for intermediate students who don't have a good dictionary, I think they waste tons of time reading newspaper articles and only finding about half the words in the dictionary.

So, what materials do you use? Textbooks are useful, but boring. Bilingual publications aren't enough for me to learn vocabulary in themselves. I still have to look up many of the Chinese words to find their precise meaning.

[woodcutter]

Textbooks aren't always so boring. After all, many of them are a collection of newspaper articles, historical articles, pieces of literature and so on.

[marcopolo79]

The benefits of using a dictionary for Chinese are many and certainly should not be ingored, let alose unused.

1) When encountering an unknown character字, it's not likely to be used in isolation, it's more porabable that it's a component of a compound word詞, if you can understand the components of a 詞 then the next time you encounter a different 詞 containting one of the 字 you have previously looked up, you'll have a better chance of understanding it at first sight.

2) Many characters have several, wildly divergent meanings, especially characters that have more than one possible prnounciation (多音字), unless you've looked up these characters in a dictionary, you might not be aware of the different contextual uses and meanings of a character.

3) There's a lot to be said for passive absorbtion, while you're checking something in a dictionary, your eye might happen to fall upon a 成語 realted to the character you're looking for, or at the very least another 字/詞 other than the one you were initally looking for. In short, there's a higher rate of indicedental learning, which sometimes is better than intended learning (especially if you're lazy like me).

4) Due to the unique nature of Chinese characters, a search through a dictionary often requires looking up the radical organized by their stroke count, forcing you to become familiar with both the radicals and the composition of Chinese characters. Knowing the radicals and their associated phonetic and semantic implications can be an immense help in making sense of written Chinese.

5) Let's face it, at some point using a dictionary is unavoidable, you can't always rely on having a translation available; due to the unique manner in which Chinese dictionaries are organized, it's recommended that you become acquainted with using a Chinese dictionary as soon as possible, it'll save you time and effort in the long run.

[woodcutter]

I never said you shouldn't use one full stop - of course you will lose out if you never do. Actually I like to gaze at Chen and Tsui's dictionary for hours - which means I become familiar with the points you mention, and can see translations with pinyin for all manner of sentences.

The point is that leafing through the dictionary is very time consuming - you lose half of your precious study time doing that. A textbook will hopefully show you the pronunciation, as well as the word being used in a natural context. We are talking about a reasonably high level of chinese here Marco - the reader will know the basics. Whether you look at a dictionary or a newspaper or a book you absorb stuff. You aren't absorbing while flipping sheets of paper to and fro.

Finding other helpful things is difficult, but there are bilingual novels around, for example.

[marcopolo79]

I find that once you get comfortable enough with characters, using a Chinese dictionary won't take any longer than using an English one (except for the occassional unknown character that can be an absolute bit*h to find , but this happens more infrequently as time goes on), and Chinese dictionaries are fascinating things. If you're really serious about studying the language, I suggest you buy (if available near you) a 辭海, and maybe even a 字源, tracing the evolution and history of the characters and words can be enlightening and helpful with both retention and being better acquainted with Chinese dictionaries.

The point is that leafing through the dictionary is very time consuming - you lose half of your precious study time doing that. A textbook will hopefully show you the pronunciation, as well as the word being used in a natural context. We are talking about a reasonably high level of chinese here Marco - the reader will know the basics. Whether you look at a dictionary or a newspaper or a book you absorb stuff. You aren't absorbing while flipping sheets of paper to and fro.

That way I don't have to spend hours and hours of my life leafing through pages of a dictionary.

Looking through a dictionary shouldn't take up half of your study time, let alone hours and hours, if it does than it might be worthwhile to review the radicals. Textbooks or other bilingual materials might show a word in a context, but you certainly can't grasp the range of meanings for certain words in Chinese without refering to a dictionary. Maybe it's just me, but I feel that knowing the basics implies that a dictionary should be viewed as an aid to be embraced rather than an impediment to be avoided.

[Lu]

If you have to look up so many words that it takes up a significant amount of your study time, the text(book) you're using is too difficult for you.

[Guest Roderic]

I've tried several ways to learn vocab, and i think flapping through dictionary is the most efficient. You can buy an electronic dictionary to make it less time-consuming to do it.

It's the way recommended by Steven Cheung, a famous chinese ecnomist: Check every word you don't understand. Memorize it. Don't jot down anything but go ahead to read. Every time you see these unfamilar words, look it up in the dictionary again and again until you can recognize them. After doing it with a novel, the vocab acquired is huge.

_______________

"Power does not corrupt man; fools, however, if they get into a position of power, corrupt power"

Echoing http://chinese-forums.com/viewtopic.php?t=2894&start=20

[Lu]

I hate that way of reading. I rather learn vocab lists for a long long time and then read something that I can understand without having to look up every word than that I 'read' something I can only understand by reading the dictionary at the same time.

Also, it doesn't work for me. There are some words that I just keep forgetting, no matter how often I look them up.

[kentsuarez]

For me, the motivation to try to read something has always come from the content of a piece, i.e., it's only when I see something that looks interesting that I'm motivated to sit down and try to read it. All my textbooks have collected dust, because the idea of flipping to the next chapter to read about some foreign student landing at an airport and being greeted by Chinese friends is a major yawn. Even if well selected, the old news stories and famous essays never catch my eye.

But when I see a newspaper headline that interests me, such as about a big earthquake which happened near me the day before, or the first airstrikes on Iraq, or the discovery of an important bronze vessel inscription which mentions a legendary figure formerly unattested in the archaeological record, then I'm motivated to sit down and work through it, despite the difficulty of frequent lookups. I can say the same about books for 5th-7th graders which introduce, with lots of pictures, dinosaurs, or the human body, and so on; and the books put out by the National Palace Museum about each of its collections. These all have bo po mo fo pronunciation beside each graph, which greatly facilitates those lookups when you're at an intermediate stage, and they are ideal for use with a dictionary like DeFrancis's excellent ABC Comprehensive.

One thing which makes it easier is having the very best in dictionary resources. If you already know most characters, the ABC Comprehensive (see Amazon reviews) makes looking up compounds by pronunciation fast. And unlike earlier dictionaries which had pinyin ordering but very sparse content, this is a rather thorough one, with vast numbers of compounds.

A second dictionary which cross-indexes single characters by their graphic components makes it easy to look up characters you don't know, with similar speed. Examples include Harbaugh, Rick (1998). Chinese Characters: a Genealogy and Dictionary 中文字譜 - 漢英字元字典, Zhongwen.com publ., ISBN 0-9660750-0-5. I've done the same thing in my own pinyin-ordered dictionary over the years, so that if I see a graph like 戍 shù or 戌 xū and can't remember which is which, I can look either one up, and the similar graphs are in the margin; plus there's a full list of those weapon graphs (based on 戈 gē) in the margin by 戈. And next to 杜dù you'll see a listing of 牡 mu3, by which, in turn, you'll see 牧 mù, and so on. Although it's impossible to sit down and do all at once, if you have a decent, handy pinyin-ordered dictionary that you use daily, I recommend that each time you initially fail to find a character under the pronunciation that you first tried (usually because you tried under a graphically similar character), you should then make a little list in the margin next to that graphically similar character of all the easily confused graphs; the next time you accidentally go there, the information will be at your fingertips, and after a while, you'll learn the difference.

Finally, get one big comprehensive tome like the Hanyu Da Zidian (once you're ready for it, as its entries are all in Chinese), which has 99.9999% of the graphs you'll ever look up.

With proper tools and increasing familiarity, you'll gain the freedom to dig into reading material of your choosing, rather than relying on materials that have been chosen and prepared for you. The freedom to do so comes gradually, of course, as the burden of lookups slowly diminishes, and rarely vanishes altogether, but at a certain point it will seem less daunting, and it becomes increasingly worthwhile.

[carlo]

My own experience is very similar to that of kentsuarez's (me too ). I tend to choose books according to my favourite subject at any one time (and these can range from aardvark to Zulu) and in fact this is probably how I became half-literate in Chinese (and English).

The advantage is that you are much more receptive to what you are reading, hence new vocabulary sticks in your memory. I suspect that the reason my German never progressed beyond conversational stage is that I didn't manage to find anything I particularly wanted to read in that language. Maybe I didn't look hard enough.

Of course, the right combination of textbook study and extracurricular reading is probably even better, a bit like studying with a good teacher and making local friends.

[woodcutter]

Of course this all depends on the level, and Roddy for one is someway ahead of me I suppose (even though SOAS gave me a stupendous mark! Easy to be good at Chinese in the UK!). The more advanced you get, the more useful a tool the dictionary becomes. Therefore intermediate students should try their best to be interested in the little nuggets of history and literature provided for them, and basic students have to accept that Mr.Smith's visit to a nice Beijing family is simply all they can easily understand! Even an advanced student is going to learn more efficiently with tailored resources though, as long as they can motivate themselves.

[yonglan]

If you have to look up so many words that it takes up a significant amount of your study time, the text(book) you're using is too difficult for you.

I very much agree.

I think study should be kept separate from reading, to some extent. What I mean is that once you get to an advanced level you should read some things just for fluency, to get a more in depth feel for the language and how it is used. You don't have to look up words you don't know as long as you can follow it. Of course, every few pages you may find some word that you're curious about, and that's ok. Kids books are generally best for this as they have Zhuyin Fuhao or Pinyin (depending on where you get them), so if a character is new to you you can at least pronounce it correctly (if they mark it correctly!).

I think study in the sense of vocabulary books/lists or dictionary reading (which I find rather fun) should be kept somewhat distinct, though this is occassionally combined (a la The Chess King).

Speaking of that last item reminds me of kentsuarez's comments. I feel 100% the same way. I have to be motivated to read something. I bought The Chess King (a novel written in Taiwan in the 1970s that has sold a bazillion copies) and the accompanying vocab book from IUP/ICLP when in Taiwan, but never did much with it.

Of course, something may be really important to you and you may wish to slug along looking up every third word, but I wouldn't call that studying (in the modern language).