21. How do you look up a word in a Chinese or Japanese dictionary?
Description
This article is from the sci.lang FAQ, by Michael Covington (mcovingt@ai.uga.edu) and Mark Rosenfelder (markrose@zompist.com) with numerous contributions by others.
21. How do you look up a word in a Chinese or Japanese dictionary?
[--markrose]
The vast majority of Chinese characters can be divided into two parts, the
radical and the phonetic. Each part is another, simpler character. The
_radical_ gives an idea of the meaning-- rather a vague idea, since
traditionally there were only 214 different radicals. The _phonetic_
identifies the sound, with a bit more precision: generally, all the
characters that share a phonetic rhymed 2000 years ago in Archaic Chinese.
(It's impossible to give examples in ASCII; see the Web page for more:
http://www.zompist.com/lang21.html)
Characters are arranged in most Chinese dictionaries by radical. To find
an unknown character, then, you identify the radical, and look up its
section in the dictionary. The radicals are arranged in order of increasing
complexity. Each radical's section is ordered by the number of strokes in
the character. Several characters may have the same number of strokes;
these must simply be scanned till the right one is found.
Sometimes it isn't easy to identify the radical-- it's in an odd position
(e.g. on the bottom or the right rather than the top or left side); or it's
drawn in an abbreviated form; or it's not clear which of several similar
radicals the character is listed under. It's also important to know the
proper method for counting strokes.
If a character isn't composed of a radical + phonetic, it's usually treated
as one, graphically, for the purposes of dictionary lookup. For instance,
the character for hao3 'good' is composed of the characters for 'woman' and
'child'-- a _semantic_ compound. It's simply listed under the 'woman'
radical, although zi3 'child' is not its phonetic.
The People's Republic simplified a number of characters and radicals, and
this changed the number of radicals-- there's 224 in my dictionary, for
instance. The Japanese have made their own separate simplification.
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