A Bridge to Chinese

Just another weblog about China and Chinese

HERE, I suggest you quite a good dictionary, THE CONTEMPORARY CHINESE DICTIONARY [Chinese-English Edition] （2002 Revised)《现代汉语词典》（汉英版）（2002年增补本）published by Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press,which I think is the best Chinese-English one.

You may ask why I like this most? 

It’s a simpe way, I just checked two items to see whether it’s a good dictionary or not.

One is comparing  “二” with “两”,  these two words are always confused by Chinese learners. “二”(er) and “两” (liang) both mean the number “two” in English, but  usages are different.  “两” is used for the number under ten, while “二”  is used for the number above ten, some exceptions like “两千两百二十二”（liang qian liang bai er shi er), two thousand and two hundred twenty two, here we say “两” instend of “二” in thousand’s place and hundred’s place.

Another is looking up the measure words like “块”(kuai) and “条”(tiao).　”块”, measure word,  for sh. shaped like lumps or chuncks. E.g. ＂一块糖＂（yi kuai tang），＂a lump of sugar＂．＂条＂, measure word, used for long and thin things. E.g. ＂两条腿＂（liang tiao tui）＂two legs＂．

So if got these two items in that dictionary, and the explanations are complete and clear, that’s definitely a good dictionary.

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 9th, 2009 at 8:23 pm and is filed under Chinese, Chinese Books, Mandarin, language. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.