Comments on: HSK Vocabulary Levels Added to MDBG

By: Hanzi

Hanzi — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 22:08:01 +0000

Perhaps you like a freeware for learning HSK characters.
downloadable at
http://www.globechinese.com/download.html

By: Jim Mahler

Jim Mahler — Sat, 05 Jul 2008 01:10:31 +0000

Many on-line dictionaries are Wikis, written by contributions from users. The quality of the translations thus varies greatly from word to word. When its important to get the “right” word, it’s a good idea to check three or four dictionaries to compare definitions.

By: Turtlewind

Turtlewind — Fri, 04 Jul 2008 10:15:58 +0000

For example, “yǎnjing” 眼睛 gets an HSK rating of 1, but yǎn 眼 by itself is 2. Surely you’d know the single character before learning the two of them together.

It depends on how you learn Chinese. I pay a lot more attention to reading than I do to handwriting (I’m lazy so I prefer to type pinyin and let my computer/phone handle the rest), and there are plenty of characters that I learned to recognise as part of a word before I knew them on their own.

By: syz

syz — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 11:08:42 +0000

Albert, I think you’ve hit on something really important here: spoken word frequencies. Anybody who’s struggled with Mandarin in a native speaker setting could probably come up with a dozen words/phrases that are very common in spoken language but show up rarely if at all in the written language — and even more vice versa. I know this is true too in English as well, but reckon that in Mandarin it’s more pronounced, no pun intended.

The problem this presents for dictionaries is that the “translation” of a word may be something that just sounds weird if spoken — and thus the Mandarin-learner totally misses the common and obvious word that everyone knows.

I keep thinking that with all the gajillions of written words that match up to spoken language from TV captioning, it’d be pretty easy to do some really cool data mining that would start to give you an answer to that question (how common is this word in spoken language?) Add that data to a good dictionary and, voila! It’s the nugget of a business idea sure to make someone rich and revered among a generation of Zhonglish speakers.