How to Use a Chinese Dictionary – Our Guide

How to Use a Chinese Dictionary

Using a Chinese dictionary can be really helpful for understanding a word or the meaning of a sentence.

A Chinese dictionary can also help you see how Chinese characters are written, on top of translating them. So, if you’re reading a newspaper in Chinese and come across a character you don’t recognize, you can look it up and better understand what you’re reading.

However, Chinese paper dictionaries are very different from the ones we have in English-speaking countries.

There are several factors to consider with Chinese dictionaries: the radicals, the number of strokes, the pinyin, and the translation (into English in our case).

Different Types of Chinese Dictionaries

For starters, if you’re a beginner then it’s best to avoid monolingual dictionaries, aka dictionaries only in Chinese.

If you don’t know enough Chinese vocabulary, it will be hard to find the characters you’re looking for, and you’ll end up feeling discouraged. To avoid this, it’s best to use an English-Chinese dictionary or a Chinese-English dictionary, aka a bilingual dictionary.

But which dictionary should you chose?

Is it better to have a paper dictionary or an online dictionary? We’ll give you some details so you can pick which works best for you.

Paper Dictionaries

Even though we’re typically not thinking of paper dictionaries in the modern area, they’re still very useful and worth considering.

Paper dictionaries are often more comprehensive than their digital counterparts. They often contain more examples and explanations that could make learning easier. And in the process of looking for a word, you’ll end up looking over similar characters, which will increase your exposure to the language and help you learn indirectly.

Digital Dictionaries

You can also use an online dictionary. A big advantage is that you can copy and paste the characters you don’t know if you’re looking online. You can also search directly in pinyin and find different examples of your word in context. With these dictionaries, you can just put the word in the search bar and see the responses, which is sure to save a lot of time!

Other dictionaries come in the form of apps that you can download and carry with you anywhere. However, many apps are incomplete and don’t necessarily provide example sentences. These dictionaries can be convenient, but they may be more difficult for beginners since they don’t put the word into context.

How to Use a Paper Chinese-English Dictionary

Using an English dictionary is fairly easy. You just look at the letters in order and search alphabetically. But it gets much more complicated in Mandarin since there isn’t an alphabet.

Without an alphabet to follow, we turn to Chinese radicals to navigate dictionaries. For Chinese dictionaries, you search for a character by starting with its radical. It can either be the entire character or the left-most radical that builds up the character. Also note that by breaking a word down into its radicals, you get an indication of what the character means.

That being said, it isn’t the only way to search in a Chinese-English dictionary. You can also search based on the meaning, the number of strokes, or even the pinyin.

The Essentials / The Keys

Here are the 10 most common radicals in Chinese:

These most common radicals are super useful to learn because they’ll make it easier to understand the Chinese characters they’re a part of. With these basics, you’ll actually have an easier time learning vocabulary or even reading Chinese.

To look for characters using their radical, you have to count the number of strokes in the radical. There’s usually an index at the beginning of the dictionary where you can find the radicals based on the number of strokes they’re comprised of. Once you’ve found the index, find the section with the right number of strokes both in the radical AND the character, and you’ll reach the section you’re looking for.

Once you’ve found the character, you’ll find the translation in English and the word’s pronunciation.

Pinyin

Some dictionaries let you to search based on the pinyin of a word. You can remember pinyin as the phonetic transcription of Chinese characters into the Latin alphabet.

To look for a word using the pinyin, you’ll need to make sure to get a dictionary that includes it. Once you have one, then you can look up the word based on our alphabetical order. And from there, you’ll have to look at similar words that might have the same or similar pinyin. A base example is the word “ma” which could mean four or even five different things. So make sure that you find the word matching with the right translation in English for, and you’ll be able to see the Chinese character that goes with the correct word.

The Meaning or the Translation

In a Chinese-English dictionary, you can also look up a word based on the English translation. This is probably the easiest way to find a word since all you have to do is search like in a regular dictionary.

However, make sure to pay attention to the context. Some words can translate into multiple different characters based on the different meanings of the word. So make sure you understand the context of the potential Chinese translations. Minor mistakes in word choice probably won’t make a big deal in informal conversations but they could be detrimental in formal contexts like work environments.

The Best Online Chinese Dictionaries

There are a bunch of websites you can find online to look up words or characters. Here are a few comprehensive choices to get you started:

• Chinese Tools
• Arch Chinese
• MDBG Dictionary

These websites also offer other features like proverbs, word of the day, calligraphy, synonyms, antonyms, and more.

For longer translations, you can use a website like DeepL which consistently provides good translations but doesn’t have pinyin. Google Translate can always be used as a supplement for simple sentences, though it isn’t recommended since it still often has errors.

Applications

If you’re looking for apps instead, we’d recommend Pleco and Hanping Chinese. Both of these are effective Chinese-English dictionaries. A lot of the translations on both of these apps are pretty literal, but it’s a shortcoming that’s quickly offset by everything else both of these apps provide:

• handwriting recognition
• voice recognition
• character recognition through photos on Android (Pleco)
• search by radicals
• search by characters (also called hanzi), pinyin, or English
• character stroke order
• example sentences
• native pronunciation audio
• and more!

Final Recommendations

And our last recommendation isn’t an app or paper, but an extension called Zhongwen that you can download on Google Chrome. If you pull up a Chinese text online, this extension will be there to give you definitions and pronunciations of words you hover over. This can help make your learning go even faster without having to switch back and forth between tabs or apps.

But with all this information, it’s now up to you to chose which dictionary/dictionaries you like the best! We would recommend doing some combinations of the ones listed above so that you’re getting the most out of your learning. As a quick recap, paper dictionaries are the most thorough, apps are the most convenient, online dictionaries can offer a variety of different materials, and extensions can read the pages your looking at with you.

Now do what you do best, and happy learning!