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anyone desiring to learn Chinese, and it may equally be very useful to those fluent in Chinese who wish to improve their English. Many efforts have been made to meet both of these needs since this dictionary contains many thousands of sentences using idiomatic and up-to-date in Chinese and English. Extreme care was taken to render all translations as accurately as possible.

      Headwords, phrases and idioms

      The dictionary includes approximately 25,000 headwords, all of which are printed in color.

      Homographs, which are different words of the same spelling, are listed as separate headwords and are indicated by number, e.g.

      seal¹ N 海豹 hǎibào [M. WD 头 tóu]

      seal² V 封闭 fēngbì

      …

      seal³ N 印章 yìnzhāng, 图章 túzhāng [M. WD 枚 méi]

      Irregular plural forms of nouns and irregular past tense and past participles of verbs are given in brackets immediately following the headwords, e.g.

      man (PL men)

      do (PT did; PP done)

      When a Chinese noun requires a special measure word, it is shown in square brackets, e.g.

      earphones N 耳机 ěrjī [M. WD 副 fù]

      Where no measure word is supplied, it indicates that the noun may be used with the default measure word 个 gè.

      This dictionary also includes around 8,000 phrases and idioms which are printed in color. This increases the lexical items to about 40,000, which is highly adequate for general professional discourse as well as everyday communication.

      Phonetic notation of the Chinese language

      In order to help the user properly pronounce the Chinese in this dictionary, every Chinese word, phrase and sentence is transliterated using pinyin which is the standard phonetic notation used nowadays. The Pronunciation section in Introducing Chinese demonstrates how to pronounce Chinese words with the help of this notation scheme. There are many free online resources which may be of use to those who wish to practice their pronunciation.

      Definitions

      Definitions for all headwords are given in their Chinese equivalents or near-equivalents. These Chinese words were chosen from the word lists taken from the world-recognized HSK Chinese Language Proficiency Examination. For a more complete reference regarding these word lists, you may wish to consult Tuttle Chinese-English Dictionary (2009).

      When a word is used in more than one grammatical category, the different parts of speech are indicated by I, II, etc, and different meanings are listed by 1, 2, etc. For example:

      document I N 1 文件 wénjiàn 2 (计算机)文件/文档 (jìsuànjī) wénjiàn/wéndàng II V 1 记录 jìlù 2 [事实+] 证明 [shìshí+] zhèngmíng

      When a word has a distinct meaning in a particular phrase, that phrase is shown in brackets within the particular part of speech, e.g.

      wolf

      …

      V (to wolf down) 狼狼吞虎咽 lángtūn hǔyān, 狼狼吞虎咽地吃 lángtūn hǔyān de chī

      In many cases common collocations are supplied in square brackets, e.g.

      lofty ADJ 1 崇高的 [+理想] chónggāo de [+lǐxiǎng] 2 高傲的 [+人] gāo’ào de [+rén], 傲慢的 àomàn de

      This means that when lofty has the sense of 崇高的 (“idealistic”) it is commonly collocated with 理想 (“thinking”), and that when it means 高傲的 (“snobbish”), it is usually followed by 人 (“people”).

      Brackets are used to indicate that an element is optional, e.g.

      crew N 1(飞机)机组人员 (fēijī) jīzǔ rényuán, …

      This indicates that crew may be 机组人员 jīzǔ rényuán or 飞机机组人员 fēijī jīzǔ rényuán (“aircrew”).

      Example sentences

      An important feature of this dictionary is the large number of example sentences with Chinese translations, about 10,000 in all. In many respects, this dictionary can be regarded as an “example sentence dictionary”. These sentences not only illustrate the meanings and usages of the more common words in English and Chinese, but also provide “ready-made” materials for instant communication and essay writing, for example. Each sentence is carefully composed to reflect the real life of the English-speaking world in order to assist the user in everyday matters, school or at work. Sentences from a wide variety of subject matters are included, and there is a good emphasis on the business and education realms as well as home life.

      Grammar codes

ABBREVabbreviation
ADJadjective
ADVadverb
CONJconjunction
INTERJinterjection
M. WDmeasure word
Nnoun
NUMnumeral
PLplural form
PPpast participle
PREPpreposition
PRONpronoun
PTpast tense
Vverb

      Introducing Chinese

      1 PRONUNCIATION

      1.1 Vowels

      SINGLE VOWELS

      There are seven basic single vowels:

asimilar to a in ah
esimilar to a in ago
ěsimilar to e in ebb (this sound never occurs alone and is transcribed as e, as in ei, ie, ue)
isimilar to ee in cheese (spelled y when not preceded by a consonant)
osimilar to oe in toe
usimilar to oo in boot (spelled w when not preceded by a consonant)
üsimilar to German ü in über or French u in tu; or you can get ü by saying i and rounding your lips at the same time (spelled u after j, q, x; spelled yu when not preceded by a consonant)

      VOWEL COMBINATIONS

      These single vowels combine with each other or with the consonants of n or ng to form what are technically known as diphthongs. These combinations are pronounced as a single sound, with a little more emphasis on the first part of the sound.

      You can learn these combinations in four groups:

Group 1:diphthongs starting with a/e/ě
aisimilar to y in my
aosimilar to ow in how
an
ang
en
eng
eisimilar to ay in may
Group 2:diphthongs starting with i
ia
iesimilar to ye in yes
iao
iousimilar to you (spelled iu when preceded by a consonant)
ian
iensimilar to in (spelled in when preceded by a consonant)
iengsimilar to En in English (spelled ing when preceded by a consonant)
iangsimilar to young
iong
Group 3:diphthongs starting with u/o
ua
uo
uaisimilar to why in British English
ueisimilar to way (spelled ui when preceded by a consonant)
uan
uen(spelled un when preceded by a consonant)
ueng
uang
ong
Group 4:diphthongs starting with ü
üeused only after j, q, x; spelled ue
üenused only after j, q, x; spelled un
üanused only after j, q, x; spelled uan

      1.2

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