Pocket Oxford Chinese Dictionary [Paperback]

If you take up Chinese with the intention of getting to serious grips with the language, you will want to arm yourself as soon as possible with the best dictionary on the market; in Britain, this Pocket Oxford is IT - and in truth it is inadequate for serious students, or anyone beyond the dilettante stage. To Oxford's credit, they do only call it a pocket dictionary, but the sad fact is that this is the most comprehensive Chinese dictionary they do, and the most comprehensive Chinese/English English/Chinese dictionary generally available in the UK. Don't blame Oxford, though; blame market forces, more of which later.
To get the positives out of the way first, the best thing about the dictionary is the clarity of its printing and the ease of use of its radical index. Everything is very crisp, and easy to access with no need to resort to microscopes to analyse minuscule characters as in other dictionaries.
But what about the dictionary's failings? Well, its vocabulary (in both halves) is way too small. Try and read a Chinese newspaper, with all of its inevitable idioms, neologisms, proper nouns and so forth, armed only with the Pocket Oxford, and you will find the task exasperating after only a few lines of reading; crucial characters, or crucial combinations of characters, will simply not be there. Or venture into any remotely specialised area of conversation (natural history, arts and crafts, sport, to name but a few) with a Chinese speaker, and you will very soon be lost for words. The paucity of its vocabulary, however, is the most excusable of its faults; after all, don't forget it is only a pocket dictionary.
More serious criticisms are that there is an unhealthy sprinkling of incorrect tones marked on the Pinyin, a scattering of misspellings, and one or two characters given in the body of the dictionary that mysteriously do not appear in the radical index.
The worst fault this dictionary has though is that it was actually created as a dictionary for Chinese learners of English rather than English learners of Chinese, and has been marketed at both kinds of learner simply because Oxford have not yet come up with anything better for the English learner of Chinese. If you need everything putting into Pinyin, you will be disappointed; a large amount of vital information is in characters but not in Pinyin, so make sure you can read a couple of thousand characters already before you buy the dictionary, though by that stage in your learning of Chinese you would want a bigger and better dictionary anyway.
What is perhaps worse than this, and ten times more insulting for the English student of Chinese, is that if you look to some English headwords, ("serious", for example,) because you are looking for the Chinese for "seriously" or "seriousness", you do indeed find the words given in English in bold type below, but with NO Chinese translation, either in characters or Pinyin. In other words, Oxford are telling you, if you are a Chinese student of English, here is the assistance you were looking for, but if you are an English student of Chinese you can go hang.
It is all a bit depressing really, but don't forget that it is ultimately market forces that are to blame; because there is so little demand among English speakers for advanced Chinese dictionaries, the best we end up with is something fairly basic. The message is more of you should get out there and get serious about learning Chinese, and one day Oxford may produce a comprehensive dictionary that serves the needs of the serious student.

I've been learning Chinese for nearly 3 years and this is best dictionary i've come across. It's really easy to use; the Chinese section is listed alphabetically in pinyin then in order of tone. The English section is good too, although in the english section when it gives sample phrases & expressions they only appear in characters, not pinyin. This is a pain too if a word has lots of Chinese translations as you have no idea which one to use with the comments and examples being in characters only. Still it's been massively helpful to me and i would recommend it to anyone wanting to get to grips with Mandarin.

This is probably the most comprehensive Chinese-English English-Chinese dictionary available. The Chinese-English portion is good. It enables you to look up a character from its root. Once you have found the pronunciation, you can look up the meaning and see a list of compound words where this is the first element together with English translations which make sense since they have been edited by a native English speaker. However, this is where the good news ends. The English-Chinese part is hopeless. There has been no input by any native English speaker. This means that it is a typically Asian dictionary listing Chinese vocabulary that is stilted and virtually never used while ignoring the words that are in daily use. The English-Chinese section is as a result useless. What came over Oxford dictionaries to give this task exclusively to Chinese people? They must surely know that the Asian way of teaching languages is stuck in the dark, distant past. Shame on you, Oxford dictionaries.