Mandarin Immersion Parents Council

How to use a Chinese dictionary, especially if you don’t speak Chinese

A presentation by the Mandarin Immersion Parents Council and parents with children in the Mandarin immersion programs at Starr King and Jose Ortega Elementary Schools, San Francisco

Cheng & Tsui’s Chinese Character Dictionary is the dictionary that the SFUSD Mandarin immersion coordinator suggests parents use to help their children with homework. We were able to purchase copies for all incoming Kindergarten families. If you didn’t get one, ask your child’s teacher.

Looking Up Words

The easiest way is to do it by sound. The dictionary is organized alphabetically by the spelling of each Chinese work using the pinyin romanization system.  The one downside to this is that our students don’t learn to read and write pinyin until beginning in second grade, so your child may not know the pinyin.  For many words, it’s pretty easy to guess. Laoshi (老师 teacher) is something the kids learn right away, and if you turn to page 216, you’ll find the word lao the 3rd entry down from the top.

The characters are listed individually, but most Chinese words consist of two or more characters together (pingguo 苹果, apple.) For many words, if you look up the first character, you’ll find the full word listed under the entry. If not, you may need to look up the second character as well.
But pinyin doesn’t always match English pronunciation. Xin (新, new) isn’t obvious. Zhuozi (桌子, table) is hard both because of the ZH spelling and trying to decide if it’s OU or UO.

Counting Strokes

If you can’t find the word by pinyin you’ll have to do it the hard way – by counting strokes.  This is where all the hard work your child is doing learning to write characters using the correct stroke order will come in handy.  On page 9 of your dictionary you’ll find the Stroke Index. This is a listing of all the words in the dictionary, by the number of strokes they contain. (The list is further subdivided into types of strokes used, but it’s daunting for non-Chinese speakers so we won’t get into that.)  So 一 (yi, one) is the first. The last is 罐 (guan, pitcher) with 23 strokes. But even in Hong Kong kids don’t learn it until 6th grade, and by then they can look up their own words.  Say you’re confronted with this character:

橙

First, ask your child to count how many strokes it has. They should say 16. Don’t try to count them yourself, as some pieces of a character that look like they should be two strokes actually count as one, and some things that seem like they should be just one stroke are in fact two.  Turn to the stroke index and look for the numbers in the columns that show stroke count. You’ll find the list for words with 16 strokes on page 18.  Then you just have to go down the list of characters until you find the one that matches the one you’re looking for.  Hint: A magnifying glass is not a bad thing to have for this.  In our case, it’s the sixth word on the list.  Now you go to page 48, where you’ll find it at the top of the page, along with the enlightening news that it’s pronounced cheng and means orange.

Quiz

Here are some words to test yourself on:

(see below for the answers)

If All Else Fails

Finally, remember that if you can’t figure out what a word means, you can always ask the teacher or other parents. Please use either your child’s classroom email list, or if you’re really stumped, the school or even Mandarin lists.  We’ve had parents take pictures of a word and then upload it to the list sites to ask for help. Be creative.  And if all else fails, your child can find out what the word means the next day when they go to school.

Older Dictionaries

One last note: Some older dictionaries aren’t indexed by pinyin or stroke count, but by radicals first and then stroke count.  This requires being able to first identify the radical, or classifier, of the character. You then look that radical up, which gives you a list of all the words that contain it, in order of how many strokes they use. You go down that list until you find the character you want and then go to the page it’s on.  Thankfully, these dictionaries are becoming less common and our students aren’t using them.

Answers

1. This has 12 strokes. Look on page 16 of the dictionary in the Stroke Index and it’s on the second page of 16-stroke words, number 13 from the top. Turn to page 274 and it’s at the top: pao, to run.
2. This has 3 strokes and is in the 3rd column on page 9. That sends you to page 380, where you find out it means wan, 10,000.