As Mandarin Chinese continues to grow in importance as an international language, more and more English-Chinese dictionaries are appearing online. These dictionaries range greatly in quality. Below is a guide for students and speakers of Chinese to help determine the most useful and high quality online Chinese dictionaries.
What Constitutes a Good Online Chinese Dictionary?
A good online dictionary should be as convenient and useful as a paper dictionary. But, since being web-based allows dictionaries to function in new ways, online Chinese dictionaries should also be judged according to their innovations.
In which particular ways should online dictionaries strive for quality in terms of design, content and function, and audience?
Design of Chinese Dictionary
- Well designed, not confusing in layout, and easy to use
- Interactive (e.g., able to click a Chinese character to see which words or idioms this character is used in, to see radicals and stroke number and order, to hear pronunciation, etc.)
Dictionary Content and Function
- Give results in, and able to input in English, pinyin , traditional or simplified characters, and other romanization systems
- Searchable radical database
- Good database of idioms
- Provide examples of how words are used in sentences, not just definitions
- Tools such as translation, etymology resources, and language acquisition exercises
Audience – Who Will Use the Chinese-English Dictionary?
- Useful for both beginners and more advanced Chinese learners
- Useful for both English and Chinese speakers
Popular Online Chinese Dictionaries
MDBG Chinese-English dictionary: The MDBG dictionary website design is simple and easy to navigate. It is also interactive. For example, each Chinese character can be clicked to see the radicals used to compose the character, its pronunciation in Cantonese and Mandarin, and to hear how the character is pronounced.
MDBG allows users to search the dictionary by inputting English, pinyin, or traditional and simplified characters. Likewise, results are given in these writing systems. MDBG has a searchable radical database, gives many idiom results, and has a good translation tool.
MDBG is useful for beginner Chinese students, advanced students, native Chinese speakers, and speakers and learners of non-Mandarin dialects, such as Cantonese.
One shortcoming of MDBG is that it does not provide example sentences when giving the definition of words. Instead, it merely lists the meanings a word or character can have.
Zhongwen.com: Zhongwen.com is somewhat easy to use, although words can only be searched for by inputing English, but not Chinese. Otherwise, characters can be search for by working through lists of radicals, pronunciation, and stroke number. This website is interactive as every Chinese character can be clicked to see their radicals and related characters.
Zhongwen.com's strongest point is that it allows users to understand the composition, patterns, and radicals of Chinese characters by including charts which detail how characters are related to each other according to radical usage.
This website uses only traditional characters, which fits the website's emphasis on understanding radicals and character composition, but makes it hard to use for the majority of Chinese language students, who learn simplified characters.
This website is very useful for students learning traditional characters. It is also useful for students of Chinese with some study under their belts who are looking for a quick and convenient website for searching for characters by radical or pronunciation.
Chinese-Tools.com: This website is relatively easy to use, in terms of having a simple design. It is an interactive dictionary, as individual characters can be clicked to see how they can be used to form multi-syllable words. Likewise, the pronunciation of characters can be listened to.
This website can be searched by inputting English, pinyin, and traditional and simplified characters. However, results can only be given in either traditional or simplified characters, but not both simultaneously. Search results are also given in the bopomofo (zhuyin) romanization system.
One great feature of Chinese-Tools.com is that each individual character can be further explored by following links to a thesaurus, an idiom dictionary, and an "example dictionary" which demonstrates how words are used in sentences. This website also has language acquisition tools.
One fault of this website is that example sentences are given in Chinese only, with no English translation. This can create a problem for students of Chinese trying to understand the exact usage of individual words and characters.
One other Chinese dictionary worth mentioning is Nciku. This is a relatively new website, but has shown itself to be very useful, particularly when it comes to interactive language acquisition exercises.
The quality of online Chinese dictionaries can be judged according to their design, function, and their overall usefulness to different groups of people. Finding the most useful and worthwhile dictionaries requires people to explore and evaluated websites personally.
Mark Brenndorfer - Mark Brenndorfer studied Chinese and Japanese language and culture (and minored in every other subject) at four universities in New ...
