| |||||||||||||||
 Trade In this Item for up to £7.80
Trade in A Frequency Dictionary of Mandarin Chinese: Core Vocabulary for Learners (Routledge Frequency Dictionaries) for an Amazon.co.uk gift card of up to £7.80, which you can then spend on millions of items across the site. Plus, get an extra £5 when you trade in books worth £10 or more until June 30, 2012. Trade-in values may vary (terms apply). Find more products eligible for trade-in.
|
Frequently Bought Together
Product details
|
More About the Author
Product Description
Review
"Xiao, Rayson and McEnery's frequency dictionary is an impressive work that will undoubtedly prove useful to students, teachers, and - because of the detailed statistical information that is given - perhaps to researchers as well.....my main reaction upon perusing this book has been a feeling of regret that it was not available to me years ago when I was first studying Chinese."
-- Michael Grosvald, the University of California at Davis
Product Description
A Frequency Dictionary of Mandarin Chinese is an invaluable tool for all learners of Mandarin Chinese, providing a list of the 5,000 words and the 2,000 Chinese characters (simplified) most commonly used in the language. Based on a fifty-million-word corpus composed of spoken, fiction, non-fiction and news texts in current use, the dictionary provides the user with a detailed frequency-based list, as well as alphabetical and part-of-speech indexes.
All entries in the frequency list feature the English equivalent and a sample sentence with English translation. The Dictionary also contains thirty thematically organized lists of frequently used words on a variety of topics such as food, weather, travel and time expressions.
A Frequency Dictionary of Mandarin Chinese enables students of all levels to maximize their study of Mandarin vocabulary in an efficient and engaging way. It is also an excellent resource for teachers of the language.
A CD version is available to purchase separately. Designed for use by corpus and computational linguists it provides the full text in a format that researchers can process and turn into suitable lists for their own research work.
Suggested Tags from Similar Products(What's this?)Be the first one to add a relevant tag (keyword that's strongly related to this product)
|
Sell a Digital Version of This Book in the Kindle Store
If you are a publisher or author and hold the digital rights to a book, you can sell a digital version of it in our Kindle Store.
Learn more
What Other Items Do Customers Buy After Viewing This Item?
Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
10 of 10 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
This dictionary lives up to my expectations. For all those learners who have always struggled with Mandarin vocabulary (as I have), this promises to be the ultimate problem solver.
True, there are a few areas for improvement, but these are minor imperfections in an otherwise brilliant achievement. The basic requirements are all fulfilled.
1) Entries are neatly arranged by frequency order - starting the most frequent word in Mandarin and ending with the 5000th. As in the best Routledge tradition, each word comes with a number (e.g. 1572) (they're not lumped together in huge frequency bands that don't really tell you which words you should memorize first).
2) There are alphabetical indexes at the end of the book that enable you to find the word you're looking for, quickly and easily. These are transliterated in pinyin (the Latin alphabet).
3) One great feature is Traditional characters. Each entry is given in Simplified characters followed by the Traditional orthography. In this world, you want both varieties.
Now for the minor imperfections.
- The bold type print quality is not very good. The most complex characters are a little difficult to read - you often need to compare them with the (Traditional) clear type characters on the right just to recognize them.
- Pinyin transliterations are enclosed in slashes. Because it's an Aerial type font, they look like l's (L's), especially at the beginning of a word. (Besides, what are the slashes for? it's not like pinyin is a phonemic transcription -- very far from that.)
- It takes time to understand the three figures at the bottom of each entry. These technical data (for corpora experts, not average linguists) call for extensive explanations, and I can only say I've found none so far in the preface. (A dictionary like this needs more focused instructions.)
- Some labels are uninformative to experts and of no use to novices. What is the difference between "loc" and "place"? "loc" seems to refer to locative prepositions; "place" might refer to locative adverbials; what does "direction and locality" really mean? Labels like these look friendly on the outside (they don't look like jargon) but in practice they are too vague and of no help to either linguists or learners.
- 5000 words make for a fantastic start, but it would have been better to have 10000 (like in the Routledge Russian Frequency Dictionary). But I understand this may depend on existing corpora.
To summarize, with this dictionary you have all you need to really tackle Mandarin Chinese. I wish a tool like this had been published before, and I hope Routledge will soon publish more frequency dictionaries for every major language.
True, there are a few areas for improvement, but these are minor imperfections in an otherwise brilliant achievement. The basic requirements are all fulfilled.
1) Entries are neatly arranged by frequency order - starting the most frequent word in Mandarin and ending with the 5000th. As in the best Routledge tradition, each word comes with a number (e.g. 1572) (they're not lumped together in huge frequency bands that don't really tell you which words you should memorize first).
2) There are alphabetical indexes at the end of the book that enable you to find the word you're looking for, quickly and easily. These are transliterated in pinyin (the Latin alphabet).
3) One great feature is Traditional characters. Each entry is given in Simplified characters followed by the Traditional orthography. In this world, you want both varieties.
Now for the minor imperfections.
- The bold type print quality is not very good. The most complex characters are a little difficult to read - you often need to compare them with the (Traditional) clear type characters on the right just to recognize them.
- Pinyin transliterations are enclosed in slashes. Because it's an Aerial type font, they look like l's (L's), especially at the beginning of a word. (Besides, what are the slashes for? it's not like pinyin is a phonemic transcription -- very far from that.)
- It takes time to understand the three figures at the bottom of each entry. These technical data (for corpora experts, not average linguists) call for extensive explanations, and I can only say I've found none so far in the preface. (A dictionary like this needs more focused instructions.)
- Some labels are uninformative to experts and of no use to novices. What is the difference between "loc" and "place"? "loc" seems to refer to locative prepositions; "place" might refer to locative adverbials; what does "direction and locality" really mean? Labels like these look friendly on the outside (they don't look like jargon) but in practice they are too vague and of no help to either linguists or learners.
- 5000 words make for a fantastic start, but it would have been better to have 10000 (like in the Routledge Russian Frequency Dictionary). But I understand this may depend on existing corpora.
To summarize, with this dictionary you have all you need to really tackle Mandarin Chinese. I wish a tool like this had been published before, and I hope Routledge will soon publish more frequency dictionaries for every major language.
Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta)
Amazon.com:
3 reviews
6 of 7 people found the following review helpful
a good supplement
6 July 2009
Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase
This is strickly a supplement for intermediate learners. Do not start off with this dictionary! The glosses are very basic, even with an example sentence, so use caution for some of the high frequency word tokens that require a lot of context.
A book like this is important to have in Chinese because it seems that no course covers most of the words that are actually used, or you learn the rare version only to find out most people use another more popular word. This dictionary solves those problems.
However, their corpus only contains a small percentage of spoken Mandarin. Therefore, expect a high percentage of literary and very "newcast" sounding words such as "consist", "consistute", "arms (in war)", "war front", "treaty" etc. All of these are relatively low frequency, which is obviously due to the corpus. Further, taking this, and adding that they remove all of the proper nouns, it seems rather verb heavy.
All in all, it is a great resource for the intermediate learner, but just use it wisely.
A book like this is important to have in Chinese because it seems that no course covers most of the words that are actually used, or you learn the rare version only to find out most people use another more popular word. This dictionary solves those problems.
However, their corpus only contains a small percentage of spoken Mandarin. Therefore, expect a high percentage of literary and very "newcast" sounding words such as "consist", "consistute", "arms (in war)", "war front", "treaty" etc. All of these are relatively low frequency, which is obviously due to the corpus. Further, taking this, and adding that they remove all of the proper nouns, it seems rather verb heavy.
All in all, it is a great resource for the intermediate learner, but just use it wisely.
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful
Useful
15 Jan 2011
Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase
I think the Frequency approach is a very interesting one : Study the most used words first, makes total sense to me. I was really looking forward to get this Frequency dictionary, and still consider it very useful, however, a few things immediately caught my attention which i didn't like at all . . . For all words in this Dictionary they use the BOLD typeset, which makes a lot of words simply unreadable -> Very bad idea ! Second thing which is a downer is no use of pinyin in the example sentences. Since this dictionary is probably mainly used by people who are studying the most basic building blocks of the Mandarin Language, having to look up most characters in the example sentences also makes it less practical. Other than that i am happy to have this dictionary, So 5 stars minus 2 stars = 3 stars !
Awesome
25 Jan 2012
Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase
Awesome! I have been looking for one of these for years! The layout is great and easy to read. This is a must have book for all Chinese learners!
Were these reviews helpful?
Let us know
Listmania!
Look for similar items by category
- Books > Languages > By Language > Chinese > By Publisher > Routledge
- Books > Languages > By Language > Chinese > Dictionaries
- Books > Languages > By Language > Chinese > Learning Materials
- Books > Languages > By Language > Chinese > Mandarin
- Books > Reference > Dictionaries & Thesauri
- Books > Reference > Encyclopaedias
- Books > Reference > Language
Look for similar items by subject
Feedback
- Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?
- I am the Author, and I want to comment on my book.
- I am the Publisher, and I want to comment on this book.
|
