A Dictionary Of Chinese Characters: Accessed By Phonetics

摘要

As a learner of the complex Chinese language himself, the author, Dr Stewart Paton (Head of Department of Languages at Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh, from 1976 to 1981), can attest to the uphill task of memorizing Chinese characters, making sense of the compound characters and learning to pronounce them. His experience culminated in the creation of this unusual Chinese dictionary of frequently used words, which is targeted primarily at non-Chinese speaking students at their basic stage of study. This dictionary is similar to standard Chinese-English dictionaries in its arrangement of alphabetical listing of Hanyu Pinyin (Chinese phonetics) with the corresponding Chinese character followed by the English explanation of its meaning. The key difference lies in its grouping of frequently used characters that share the same phonetic under one key character, then linking them by cross-references. Paton's reasoning for this unusual arrangement is that it helps the foreign learner to fix the link between the character, pronunciation and meaning. The other unique feature of the dictionary is the presentation of similar looking characters next to each another with a highlight of their differences to the learner. This feature is put in place to address the foreign learner's tendency to confuse similar looking characters (which is a common problem even for the Chinese).