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OVERCOME THE LANGUAGE BARRIER with this unique guide to the common
words used in everyday conversation by both Chinese
and English-speaking peoples.
This dictionary is based on a simple yet effective system
in which
each word listed is given a number for quick cross-referencing between the two
languages.
And to make translating instant and easy, both the English-Chinese and
Chinese-English sections include:
The English word
The Romanized transliteration of the word
The Pinyin transliteration of the word with tone-accents
The simplified Chinese Characters for each word
You can see at a glance the English and Chinese equivalents of every word.
This special format, plus the appendix of classic Chinese characters makes
THE BASIC ENGLISH-CHINESE CHINESE-ENGLISH DICTIONARY
an indispensable aid for travelers, students, businessmen, or
anyone interested in the Chinese language and culture.
INTRODUCTORY NOTES
The purpose of this compact little book is to help the
reader to communicate easily with Chinese-speaking
people. Its uniqueness is the
numerical order in which
It is arranged. An Arabic number is attached to each
word -- always the same number for the respective
word no matter in which section of the book it is found.
English is alphabetized, while Chinese is indexed
according to the number of strokes. The transliteration
follows the official Romanization with the pronunciation
accents for Mandarin.
The underlying idea is not to "computerize." It is
that numbers are the only existent international
"language" (to a certain degree musical notation also has
this quality) used almost uniformly all over the world.
This method is especially appropriate for the Chinese
language with its highly complicated system of
character strokes instead of an alphabet, is difficult
even for linguists to master. Not knowing a single
stroke of Chinese writing or the idiosyncrasies of the
four-tone pronunciation (which practically only a
native is able to grasp), one has simply to follow the number attached to the word and thereby find the meaning of the word with its approximate transliteration.
The book can be used with equal ease by any
Chinese, although it is based on the official Mandarin
language. Universality of the stroke signs and of the
numbers attached to each word in this book makes
this possible.
Limitation of the vocabulary to 1000 words follows
the pioneering work of C. K. Ogden’s "Basic English,"
with its 850 most frequently used words; additional
selections were based on studies of word frequency
computations, especially for travelers. One thousand
words surpasses the vocabulary used by educated
people in daily life.