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8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
A disgrace, or just a serious mistake?, 7 May 2003
BEWARE! This dictionary looks good. At first sight it seems compact and neatly presented. The English-Chinese section includes some essentials not always found in other dictionaries: (1) it gives Chinese words in Chinese characters and in Pinyin complete with tones; and (2) it distinguishes, in English, between different senses of English words.But the dictionary is a disgrace, totally unprofessional and nearly useless. I took a leading article in the Melbourne Age newspaper - the kind of article in straightforward English, without fancy words, that I would give to a mid-level student of English. Its short first paragraph contained the following words, not one of which is in the English-Chinese section of the dictionary: security, endure, terrorism, establish, prompt, territory, constant, covert, action, suggest, seizure, cargo, weapon, numerous, revive, struggle, invasion, negotiate, settlement, image, cling, and detriment. In the same paragraph, common usages not in the dictionary included bound for, and along with. The dictionary does not contain grain, radical, philosophy, biography, motive, lung, darling or despair. Words that DO appear include: decaffeinated, evacuate, slot machine, beet root, hockey, showjumping, kangaroo, eggcup, hostage, hoover, and coconut. If looking for words reminds you of children looking for "naughty" words in a dictionary at school, there is no need to bother; this book will not help you to talk about penises, vaginas, urine, nipples or puberty, let alone anything more adventurous. Many words specifically important in China are missing, at least from the English-Chinese section, including: dynasty, pagoda, province, prefecture, county - even (unbelievably) communist and Marxist. Even some words in the Chinese-English section fail to appear in the English-Chinese section, including: dynasty, province, county and pagoda. As for compactness, that too is a delusion: the paper is at least twice as thick as it needs to be. That means that, for the actual size of the book, it contains no more than half the material that it could. It needed the other half to begin being useful. In these days when computers are obtainable in Djibouti, let alone Great Clarendon Street Oxford, it is difficult to understand how a dictionary could get words out of alphabetical order; but obtain comes before observe.
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