Useless New Oxford Mandarin-English dictionary – no pinyin

So I shelled out $75 for this dictionary and it arrived at my local bookstore today. AND THERE’S NO PINYIN IN THE ENGLISH SIDE!

It’s useless, or at least 50% useless! (the Mandarin-English side grudgingly gives pinyin for main words, but not for many compounds and examples)

So your kid says “Mama, how do you say ‘lion’ in Mandarin?” as she does her homework. You tell her to  go to this dictionary and look up lion in the English-Mandarin side and it tells her lion is 狮子.

Well, that was helpful. You child knows how to write it but not say it. So the two of you have to laboriously count the stroke order and look it up in the Mandarin-English side, only to have her say “Oh, it’s shirzi! I knew that, I just forgot.”

I simply don’t get the thinking behind doing an entire dictionary with the presumption that the only people using it are people who are already fluent readers of Chinese. Do they not think that other people might be learning Chinese? It’s maddening.

So don’t buy this dictionary unless you happen to have a fluent reader of Mandarin in your household. It’s just not worth the price given that it doesn’t provide pronunciation.

And if there’s something I’m missing about why one would want a dictionary that didn’t provide pronunciation, please enlighten me. (Sorry, I’m pretty peeved right now – why is it so hard to find a good English-Chinese, Chinese-English dictionary for English speakers?)

–Beth

From the Wall Street Journal

Five years, 60 editors and translators, 300,000 words, 370,000 translations: It all adds up to the largest single volume English-Chinese, Chinese-English dictionary ever put together, due to be published Sept. 9 by Oxford University Press.

For Julie Kleeman, one of the dictionary’s two chief editors, putting together the dictionary has been a long but ultimately satisfying slog. Having read every entry in the huge tome at least once, she’s confident it’s a departure from other such dictionaries on the market, both within China and elsewhere.

“It presents both English and Chinese in a much more modern, colloquial, conversational way,” she says, in part a result of using native speakers of both languages in the compilation process, the first time this has happened on an English-Chinese dictionary of this size.

Please click here to read more.