Would you use a "Situational Dictionary"?

[zhiming]

Have you ever known that you will be in a particular situation in the near future where you’ll need or want to speak Chinese? For example, you’re going to the dentist and you want to be able to understand what the dentist is saying and be able to speak with the dentist about your teeth. If you know you’re going to be in this situation you can study up beforehand, but what do you study? What words do you need to know? I’ve been working to solve this problem, not just for the dentist situation, but for hundreds of situations.

 

I’m putting together a “situational dictionary” containing lists of words that you may encounter in a situation and I’m doing it for all the words contained in the CC-CEDICT open source dictionary of over 120,000 words. Basically one can look up the situation in the dictionary and see a list of words to study.

 

This is similar to what you might find in a travel guide book under a section labeled “Ordering food from a restaurant” except instead of it being a list of a dozen words and phrases, it would be a comprehensive list containing every word that is specific to the “dining in a restaurant” situation and their English definitions. This could be a list of hundreds of words. The dictionary will specify which words are common vs obscure and which ones are colloquial, formal, or slang. 

 

It could be used by Chinese learners of all levels from beginner to advanced. It might, in the future, contain common phrases, but the initial purpose of the dictionary is not to teach grammar. It assumes, like most dictionaries, that the user already has some idea of how to form phrases from individual words.

 

I’m trying to judge interest in such a dictionary. Please reply if you would or would not find this useful and any suggestions you have to make it more useful.

It could be turned into a mobile app and/or web app with the ability to create sublists of the material for study and a flash card feature. Is this an app you would be willing to pay for? If so, how much would you be willing to pay for it? I'm not expecting to make a profit off of this - just to recoup some of the cost of making and hosting it.

[Moshen]

How is this idea different from a phrase book, of which there are a zillion?

 

(Google "chinese phrase book" to see some.)

 

Typically a phrase book (print or online) is divided into situations, with sentences useful for those situations and the pronunciation given phonetically as well as in correct writing.  

 

You say you want to give "every" word for each situation, which in my opinion is not only impossible but also totally unnecessary.  The more items you give for each situation, the less useful the compendium becomes, in my opinion.

[zhiming]

I should clarify that this would not be a  phrase book. In fact it, initially, would not contain any phrases. It's a dictionary with at least 100,000 entries. Unlike a typical Chinese-English dictionary where you look up a word that you already know about by its radical or pronunciation, in this dictionary you would find words you don't know about by looking up the situation or context in which they are used.
 

Phrase books are typically for early Chinese learners. While the dictionary could be used by beginners to expand their vocabulary, I think intermediate and advanced Chinese learners would get even more use out of it in order to round out their vocabulary. So it would need to have more vocabulary in it than even a very large phrase book. It would allow the user to pick up some terms that maybe aren't super common but they're still likely to encounter in an advanced speaking/listening situation for which they are preparing. I agree that, given the plethora of resources out there for beginner to intermediate learners, a more comprehensive dictionary of terms may not be necessary for those learners. There are, however, very few learning aids for the more advanced learner to use to proactively expand their vocabulary.

[Dlezcano]

I think if well made it is a good idea.

[sanchuan]

I believe it would be of scarcely any use to beginner and intermediate students. Advanced speakers might theoretically be tempted by the prospect of swatting up on technical vocabulary in advance of an important event (or even well in advance to be able to cram flashcards on it). But in practice I don't think anyone would actually do so, especially since, as an advanced speaker, it's far easier to learn things in the course of normal human interaction (or AI interaction!), than it is to absorb hundreds of vocab items (and their respective register/frequency?) in bulk, in advance and as a list. 

 

Besides, glossaries of this kind already exist, often in the form of 'illustrated dictionaries', where technical vocabulary is grouped by topic and presented with relevant pictures. Even in such a user-friendlier format, though, I do wonder who really 'studies' or 'uses' them and why/how.

 

I keep using the term 'technical vocabulary', by the way, because verbs and other parts of speech are rarely if ever topic-specific, so all we're really talking about is nouns - and boring compounds at that (eg XX车, XX机器, etc), which non-specialists would seldom need to learn in full. 

 

A flashcard deck/app inspired by an illustrated dictionary could well find a market, but I can't comment on the legality, value or even effectiveness of such an enterprise.

[Lu]

I would theoretically find it very useful, but I would have trouble trusting it. English to Chinese dictionaries are usually made for an audience of Chinese speakers who want to learn the meaning of an English word. The Chinese translation given is usually adequate for understanding the English word, but it's not always the term Chinese speakers actually use, or only some of them use it, or only in specific situations, or they actually say that kind of thing in a different way entirely, or they don't say it at all but do/say something else instead...

 

For that reason, I would not spend money for a situational dictionary made from existing English-Chinese dictionaries. I would use it, but only as one of several sources when I would need a list of vocab words to study. On the other hand, if it was made with the express purpose of teaching English speakers the right Chinese words for specific situations, then I would be willing to spend money on it.

[lordsuso]

On 6/6/2024 at 11:50 PM, Moshen said:

The more items you give for each situation, the less useful the compendium becomes

I agree with this.

 

I think that AI tools like ChatGPT do a pretty good job of giving a concise list of vocabulary if you query them. I would be interested in a flashcard app that had such an AI-powered search function: I write a query or pick one from a list, and I am given 10-20 relevant flashcards to review, and if I find them useful I can add them to my usual deck if they're not already there.

 

The current flashcard app I use is more similar to your initial idea. I manually added tags to some of my flashcards (history, family, myth, conjunction, preposition, basketball, dated, slang, loanword, etc) and in the app I can choose a tag and be given all the corresponding words. But like I said above I wouldn't review hundreds of words for a one-off scenario like going to the dentist.

[abcdefg]

As an advanced beginner and intermediate learner I often made topical lists of unfamiliar vocabulary in advance of going into a new situation. I remember putting together something like that before going computer shopping in China for the first time. The act of compiling the list of terminology served as a good learning process in and of itself. I dug the words out of actual native content and saved them, together with example phrases or sentences that showed how to use them. I reviewed it a couple times before going to 电脑城 and then used the new vocabulary hard for several hours over the course of a couple of days. Based on this "live" use, made a few changes in response to situations when people had not understood me in the computer stores. Also polished my pronunciation. After that, the "computer shopping vocab" was mine forever, in my head, not in an app on my phone in my pocket. When I had a one-to-one tutor, I also reviewed the vocabulary with him or her before such a venture.

 

All of which is to say that I would not find such a dictionary as you are proposing useful. It still might find a niche, however, among casual travelers who want to build out their Lonely Planet Pocket Phrase Book with additional vocab. Or maybe something aimed at business travelers would prove popular. 

[suMMit]

I would not buy something like this. Or a picture dictionary as mentioned above , though pic dictionary would be more tempting. Too many resources already, not enough time. 

 

I have found a good "Situational" dictionary to be YouTube, bilili - just type in a keyword /phrase in Chinese and there's lots of videos with tons of vocabulary that revolve around it, plus listening, plus entertaining.