A Frequency Dictionary of Mandarin Chinese: Core Vocabulary for Learners (Routledge Frequency Dictionaries) [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.

The main point of this book is that it contains 5004 Chinese sentences ordered by frequency. Unfortunately, because the authors have been so vague about how these sentences were written and selected, it isn't really possible to assess their value for a student.

The authors state in the introduction that the Chinese sentences and English translations have been selected from a Chinese-English parallel corpus, and that's it.

They do not state whether the corpus consists of works originally written natively in Chinese, and then translated into English, or vice-versa, or some combination. It's possible that some of the Chinese sentences have been translated from English, and feature unnatural constructions, "translatese", if you will. Or not. They don't make it clear where they got the sentences from. It's possible that some of the sentences feature archaic language. Or not.

So can you trust that you are getting real, by a native for a native, authentic, modern, vernacular Chinese? No.

Other, slightly more trivial shortcomings include:

* All sentences are written in simplified characters, with no traditional equivalent provided. (Although the traditional equivalent is provided for one word of each sentence.)

* No pinyin gloss on any of the sentences. (Although the pinyin is provided for one word of each sentence.)

* Some of the translations are a bit dodgy.

The typeface in the book is too small, so readers with poor eyes might struggle. But this book provides a great vocabulary resource, with 5000 high frequency words, indexed in several ways, with a sample sentence for each. The 5000 words employ just over 2000 different characters.