If you’ve already got Chubby and Lenny, but you need more words, then this dictionary is for you. I call him “Big Red” to distinguish him from the smaller, thinner version (“Little Red”). You wouldn’t want to try to carry him around, but this guy is a must-have for any learner of Chinese who wants to go beyond “nǐ hǎo”.
Big Red’s strengths:
- Much larger vocabulary (than Chubby and Lenny).
- Pinyin for all the main entries (this is obviously a must-have).
- Available for purchase in most big bookstores in China.
Big Red’s weaknesses:
- There is no pinyin for the sentence examples, only hanzi and English. This renders the sentence examples useless to a learner of Chinese who doesn’t know 3000 hanzi characters yet.
- Big and heavy (600+ pages).
Details
ISBN: 7100043581
Real (boring) title: Concise English – Chinese Chinese – English Dictionary (Third Edition)
For my review of an online dictionary click here
Great review. Have you ever thought of taking a look at 中文自谱？This my favorite dictionary. Plus, the whole thing is available online! (zhongwen.com)
After having bought both “Chubby” and “Lenny” (well… 2 “Lenny”s– Lenny1 stolen in Changchun, and Lenny2 lost in a cab in Kunming), I decided last weekend to find a more comprehensive home edition… and… no joke… I bought that same dictionary this past weekend. My foreign friends have been using “Big Red” for a while, and I decided to break down and buy one, too!
I’m glad I did! 🙂