I ♥ Chinese Books

Since I started learning Chinese I've collected quite a collection of books on the subject. These include textbooks, dictionaries, books on grammar, calligraphy, culture, history and a couple of novels (although it's still rather challenging to read those). Some I bought on-line, but a lot of them I bought in Taiwan and China where books are dead cheap. Here are two of my favorites.

Chinese Characters by Dr. L. Wieger

(Google Books) (Amazon)

This is already a true old-timer. The last edition dates from the sixties, and the original research predates that with at least three decades. Nevertheless it's a book that I can just browse around in for hours on end. It was written by a German missionary in China, and was later translated into French and from French into English. Both the language used and the typesetting give this book an archaic feel which I think adds to its charm.

The book contains 177 “etymological lessons” explaining each time a handful related characters. For each the seal script version and the modern version is given with an explanation of the shape and origin of the character. Often the seal script version still shows detail that has been lost in the modern version, and so it provides real insight (quite literally) into the characters.

Many entries also mention the Shuowen Jiezi entry (the oldest Chinese dictionary on etymology.), although if you don't know a bit of classical Chinese that might not be too handy. To find a specific character there's a radical-stroke index, but also a total stroke index and an alphabetical index. You can also just look up a character on ZhongWen.com, each entry on that site lists the lesson number of the character in this book.

A second part of the book contains 858 “phonetic series”, where characters that share a phonetic component are listed together. This is something I haven't seen in other books, and it's mostly interesting because it shows that some phonetic components can indicate two or more different sounds. E.g. 元 can indicate a character is pronounced “yuan” in 蚖 or 院, but means “wan” in 完 or 玩.

There's also an introduction that provides some background reading on characters and their origins. And at the back there's a list of characters of which the Kangxi radical is hard to figure out. Finally there's an alphabetical lexicon and a radical-stroke lexicon, although I see little use for them given that pretty much any other dictionary is as least as good, if not much better. So really the book could have been half as thick.

The main shortcomings of this book are related to its venerable age. Chinese etymology has advanced significantly since then, especially since the discovery of a large number of Shang dynasty oracle bones in Anyang. If you really need scientific accuracy there's probably better tomes out there. In the Amazon comments on this book a number of titles are suggested.

Another thing is that at the time of writing Mainland China had yet to simplify their characters, so only traditional forms are given. And of course the romanization scheme of choice in those days was Wade-Giles and not Hanyu Pinyin. But even given these shortcomings the fact remains that it's a unique work that's useful for study and fun to browse in.

Far East Pinyin Chinese-English Dictionary

(Amazon)

 This is my little baby, my classmate in Taiwan used to call it the Green Dragon. It's simply a pocket dictionary, but it gets many things right. While studying in Taiwan I would always have this one with me when going to class. Nowadays I have an electronic dictionary, and naturally I use on-line dictionaries a lot, but I still regularly use this one as well. Nothing beats the feel of real paper.

The “Pinyin” in the title refers to the fact that it's sorted alphabetically by Pinyin. A lot of times you know (or are able to guess) the pronunciation of what you're looking for, and in those cases looking something up goes blazingly fast. There's still a traditional radical-stroke and total stroke index as well. There's a main entry for each character, and then underneath that are all words starting with that character. The pinyin is printed in a nice bold font, really easy to skim through and find what you're looking for. The pinyin and character for the main character entries is printed in red, which makes them a natural point of focus and brings more interest to the pages.

But the greatest thing about this dictionary is its size. There are about 4000 main character entries, and some 40,000 individual words, phrases and expressions listed, including quite a few chengyu. This makes it likely that for the first few years of study everything you need to know is in these pages, and characters that aren't you probably shouldn't care about. This also makes it a fun book to simply browse in, since pretty much everything in there is useful to know.

Even though it's by a Taiwanese printer a lot of mainland words are also included, especially in the field of computers and multimedia. It would have been nice to have an indication that a word is specific to a certain region, but that's a minor critique. The translations are concise and good. Of course having a bigger, more elaborate dictionary at home as well is not a bad idea.

Being a Taiwanese book naturally only traditional characters are listed. With each main character the simplified version could have been shown as well, perhaps a missed opportunity. But variants of characters that are in use in Taiwan are often mentioned.

In the back there's a list of countries and capitals, but only the pinyin is given, no characters. There's also a fold out chart of the pinyin intials and finals and the valid combinations. Not a bad reference for a beginning student.