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Chinese > Books for learning Chinese >
Highly recommended - A stark contrast to the traditional dictionary. Far more visual and friendly. Absolutely not a replacement for an actual dictionary.
Feel free to change the Amazon.com URL from .com to your language of choice. Odds are good that it'll be available from another amazon.foo website.
Size - 14cm x 16.5cm x 2.5cm - not a pocket book, but still compact.
Cover - Traditional fragile paperback.
Pages - Bright white, thick, glossy. Text on the opposing side does not show through at all.
Text and pictures - High-quality full colour. The font is a little too small. I would not travel with this and expect to read it comfortably when distracted or in poor lighting.
This book does not have Traditional Chinese characters.
This is a complex book to describe. It's a visual dictionary which is broken into major themes. Each theme has a number of minor topics. Each topic has one or more pictures. Each picture has one or more items being pointed to. Each pointer gives the Chinese character, pinyin and English translation for what's being pointed-to.
The annoyance is that it's pretty damned random. There's a table of contents for the major themes, each with a thumbnail. Personally I think the thumbnails make it harder to use it. Next there is another table of contents, this time with each major section's minor topics. Here you can clearly see that the minor topics aren't sorted alphabetically.
The actual content itself, and I cannot stress this enough, is fucking spectacular. It's impossible for it to be anywhere near thorough, but it does cover quite a lot of interesting things. Parts of the body, body expressions, animals, plants, parts of a toilet, etc. Hell, it has one for asthma and inhaler.
- Particles and antonyms
- Useful phrases
- Chinese index (just pinyin, no Chinese characters)
English index
It's unfortunate that they didn't take a few extra pages to expand the indexes so they were more dictionary-like.
