I am hardly an expert at Chinese as I have only been learning it since January 2013. In this time I have mostly taught myself by using various websites. I have been using the website zhongwen.com for a while to learn Chinese characters. Usually, I've just copied and pasted new characters in and looked them up that way, but I spent the past week visiting Malaysia where I saw plenty of Chinese characters on storefronts and signs. Since I obviously can't copy and paste those, I decided it was time to learn for myself exactly how a Chinese dictionary might work. But before getting into that, I need to briefly explain how Chinese characters work.
Radicals
For those who don't know, Chinese doesn't use an alphabet like English, but it uses characters, which are essentially drawings or pictographs that represent an idea. Some of these are clearly based on the thing they represent. 木 for instance kind of looks like a tree, and 山 looks like mountain peaks. Other ideas, however, are going to be much more complicated to represent. After all, what does "courage" or "freedom" look like? So many Chinese characters involve a combination of characters, which are usually referred to simply as "radicals," to represent these ideas. For instance, 女 is a picture of a woman walking, and 子 is supposed to look like a small child with the legs bundled together. Combine them and you get 好, which means "good," meaning that at some point, someone decided that nothing represents the idea of "good" better than a mother with a child. Of course, when you have this explained, it makes sense, but you would probably not be able to deduce it simply by looking at the characters.
Most of the time, the combination of characters doesn't follow such a simple a + b = c sort of formula. Instead, the radicals used would be similar to a rebus, where one character sounds kind of like another one:
In this example, the picture of an eye doesn't mean an actual eye, but rather the word that sounds like it: the first person pronoun "I." Similarly, the picture of a can means "can" as in to be able, the sea is the verb "to see", and the young sheep (or "ewe") is supposed to sound like "you." So all together it's, "I can see you."
As I understand it, the majority of Chinese characters follow this similar way of forming more complex characters, where one of the radicals might indicate the meaning of the word, while the other relates to its pronunciation. So the character 忠, pronounced "zhong" and meaning loyal, is a combination of the radicals 心, which means "heart" and relates to the meaning of the word, and 中, meaning "middle", and which is also pronounced "zhong." In other words, the character could be described as having something to do with the heart (which loyalty does) and sounding like the word for middle. The problem is, of course, there's no way of knowing which is which if you don't already know the character. That is, there is nothing that indicates that 心 contains the meaning and not the pronunciation. Chinese characters are ultimately written assuming that you already know the word. They're not written for language learners, and there is no way you can sound the character out. As such, when coming across a new character, using a Chinese dictionary is essential.
Strokes
While Chinese doesn't have the equivalent of an alphabetical order, it does organize its characters by number of strokes. Simple characters like 一 (which is the number 1), only take one stroke to draw. Others take 2, like 人, which means person. The dictionary on zhongwen.com has one character that goes as high as 32 strokes. It's important to note that strokes are not necessarily the same as lines, since strokes can curve. Like with the aforementioned character 中. Even though it looks like it is composed of five lines, it is actually only four strokes.
The next two characters are much easier. For 由, the box divided into four squares is the radical, and I was able to quickly find its meaning. I couldn't figure out what the radical was supposed to be for the next character, 此, so I just counted that it had 6 strokes and was able to find it that way. At this point, it might seem that it would be easiest to skip the radicals and head straight to the stroke count, and in some cases this might be true (e.g., there are very characters with only 2 or 3 strokes). But some can still have hundreds to sort through, so again I feel like it's best to use as a last resort. At any rate, these two characters combine to form one word, which means "henceforth" or "from here."
Up next was 上, and again I wasn't entirely sure what the radical was. But it was only 3 strokes, and therefore easy to find. It means "up."
The next character was another one I already knew, 天, which is "tian" meaning "day" or "sky." But again if I didn't know it, I'd have some problems figuring out the radical. As I understand it, it ultimately comes from 人, which is a person (though you only see the two legs). Put a line through that, and it's like a person holding their arms out： 大. When a person holds their arms out like this it makes them look big, and this character means just that, "big." Put a line above that and you have the sky or heaven, 天, since the heavens are above even the biggest person. It all seems fairly logical, I suppose, but which is the radical? The two-stroke 人 or the three-stroke 大? I tried looking at 人 first, but couldn't find it, then went farther down and found it under 大. So this is obviously another complication, where some radicals are based on other radicals.
The next radical, 后, seems to have the same complications with trying to figure out which radical to look up. As it turns out, the one to look up is 口，which means "mouth." The rest of the image is of a person leaning forward, then giving orders with their mouth. It could be translated as "empress", which is "hou" in Chinese, and together with "tian" would mean the empress of the heavens (or Tian Hou, the name of the temple). In this case, the empress it's referring to is Mazu, the Chinese mother goddess to whom this particular temple is dedicated.
So at this point I figured the last character meant "temple" and that the whole sentence basically meant, "Please, from here go up to the Thean Hou Temple", but for the life of me I couldn't figure out what radical to look up to figure it out, since I count at least four being used in 大.殿. Since I knew it meant temple, I looked that word up to try and get an explanation of what all the parts of the character meant, but still with no luck. I had been able to figure it out from deduction, at least, and gave up on finding it the hard way.
So from this you can see that Chinese very much uses dictionaries, though there are plenty of complications that can make searching for words hard to find. This was just my first experience using one. For those of you who have more experience, what are your thoughts? How long did it take you to feel comfortable using a Chinese dictionary? Do you feel like you eventually got the hang of it?
Radicals
For those who don't know, Chinese doesn't use an alphabet like English, but it uses characters, which are essentially drawings or pictographs that represent an idea. Some of these are clearly based on the thing they represent. 木 for instance kind of looks like a tree, and 山 looks like mountain peaks. Other ideas, however, are going to be much more complicated to represent. After all, what does "courage" or "freedom" look like? So many Chinese characters involve a combination of characters, which are usually referred to simply as "radicals," to represent these ideas. For instance, 女 is a picture of a woman walking, and 子 is supposed to look like a small child with the legs bundled together. Combine them and you get 好, which means "good," meaning that at some point, someone decided that nothing represents the idea of "good" better than a mother with a child. Of course, when you have this explained, it makes sense, but you would probably not be able to deduce it simply by looking at the characters.
Most of the time, the combination of characters doesn't follow such a simple a + b = c sort of formula. Instead, the radicals used would be similar to a rebus, where one character sounds kind of like another one:
In this example, the picture of an eye doesn't mean an actual eye, but rather the word that sounds like it: the first person pronoun "I." Similarly, the picture of a can means "can" as in to be able, the sea is the verb "to see", and the young sheep (or "ewe") is supposed to sound like "you." So all together it's, "I can see you."
As I understand it, the majority of Chinese characters follow this similar way of forming more complex characters, where one of the radicals might indicate the meaning of the word, while the other relates to its pronunciation. So the character 忠, pronounced "zhong" and meaning loyal, is a combination of the radicals 心, which means "heart" and relates to the meaning of the word, and 中, meaning "middle", and which is also pronounced "zhong." In other words, the character could be described as having something to do with the heart (which loyalty does) and sounding like the word for middle. The problem is, of course, there's no way of knowing which is which if you don't already know the character. That is, there is nothing that indicates that 心 contains the meaning and not the pronunciation. Chinese characters are ultimately written assuming that you already know the word. They're not written for language learners, and there is no way you can sound the character out. As such, when coming across a new character, using a Chinese dictionary is essential.
Strokes
While Chinese doesn't have the equivalent of an alphabetical order, it does organize its characters by number of strokes. Simple characters like 一 (which is the number 1), only take one stroke to draw. Others take 2, like 人, which means person. The dictionary on zhongwen.com has one character that goes as high as 32 strokes. It's important to note that strokes are not necessarily the same as lines, since strokes can curve. Like with the aforementioned character 中. Even though it looks like it is composed of five lines, it is actually only four strokes.
image taken from wiktionary.com
Also note, that in a Chinese dictionary, it is very likely that the stroke numbers will be written in Chinese, so it helps to know your Chinese numbers (1 = 一，2 = 二, 3 = 三，4 = 四，5 = 五，6 = 六，7 = 七，8 = 八，9 = 九, 10 = 十).
Using the Dictionary
Knowing about radicals and strokes, anyone should be able to look up anything in a Chinese dictionary. Unfortunately, there are some inevitable complications I found while trying to do it myself. While I was visiting the Thean Hou Temple in Kuala Lumpur, I saw a sign directing me which read as follows:
请由此上 天后殿
Now actually, I know the first character 请，which means "please." But let's pretend that I didn't. It appears to be made of three radicals, the part on the left that kind of looks like a fancy lower-case "i", the double cross on top and to the right, then finally the double box with legs. Any three of these could be the radical you would look up in the dictionary, but unfortunately, only one of them is the right one. How to tell which is right is anyone's guess. So it strikes me that the only strategy to use is to work left to right and try each one until you find it. Of course, if you try this yourself you will come up empty-handed. The strategy I would try after that would be to check the stroke count section. This character appears to be made from 10 strokes, but if you look it up there, you still won't find it.
The reason for this is that Chinese characters can come in two sets: traditional and simplified. The simplified set was created a while back to help improve literacy by making the traditional characters easier to write. The traditional version of the character actually looks like this: 請. The radical one would look up to find this word is 言, but this character is very different in terms of stroke count and shape in the simplified form. Without knowing this, you would probably never find the meaning.
The next two characters are much easier. For 由, the box divided into four squares is the radical, and I was able to quickly find its meaning. I couldn't figure out what the radical was supposed to be for the next character, 此, so I just counted that it had 6 strokes and was able to find it that way. At this point, it might seem that it would be easiest to skip the radicals and head straight to the stroke count, and in some cases this might be true (e.g., there are very characters with only 2 or 3 strokes). But some can still have hundreds to sort through, so again I feel like it's best to use as a last resort. At any rate, these two characters combine to form one word, which means "henceforth" or "from here."
Up next was 上, and again I wasn't entirely sure what the radical was. But it was only 3 strokes, and therefore easy to find. It means "up."
The next character was another one I already knew, 天, which is "tian" meaning "day" or "sky." But again if I didn't know it, I'd have some problems figuring out the radical. As I understand it, it ultimately comes from 人, which is a person (though you only see the two legs). Put a line through that, and it's like a person holding their arms out： 大. When a person holds their arms out like this it makes them look big, and this character means just that, "big." Put a line above that and you have the sky or heaven, 天, since the heavens are above even the biggest person. It all seems fairly logical, I suppose, but which is the radical? The two-stroke 人 or the three-stroke 大? I tried looking at 人 first, but couldn't find it, then went farther down and found it under 大. So this is obviously another complication, where some radicals are based on other radicals.
And speaking of 人, when it appears with another radical it changes its form to look more like a really thin letter "T", like in the word 你. Another common one that changes is 水，which means water. When it combines with another radical, it becomes three short lines, as in 汉, which is "han", as in the main ethnic group of China.
The next radical, 后, seems to have the same complications with trying to figure out which radical to look up. As it turns out, the one to look up is 口，which means "mouth." The rest of the image is of a person leaning forward, then giving orders with their mouth. It could be translated as "empress", which is "hou" in Chinese, and together with "tian" would mean the empress of the heavens (or Tian Hou, the name of the temple). In this case, the empress it's referring to is Mazu, the Chinese mother goddess to whom this particular temple is dedicated.
So at this point I figured the last character meant "temple" and that the whole sentence basically meant, "Please, from here go up to the Thean Hou Temple", but for the life of me I couldn't figure out what radical to look up to figure it out, since I count at least four being used in 大.殿. Since I knew it meant temple, I looked that word up to try and get an explanation of what all the parts of the character meant, but still with no luck. I had been able to figure it out from deduction, at least, and gave up on finding it the hard way.
So from this you can see that Chinese very much uses dictionaries, though there are plenty of complications that can make searching for words hard to find. This was just my first experience using one. For those of you who have more experience, what are your thoughts? How long did it take you to feel comfortable using a Chinese dictionary? Do you feel like you eventually got the hang of it?
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