Chinese Characters: A Genealogy and Dictionary

I'm studying chinese language for 2 years now, have some conventional dictionaries and use internet for help me learning. After several months of using [...] as my prefered online dictionary to get definitions, and character genealogy, I bought this excellent book that has very clever indexes to find the information using the sounds, character components, pinyin, english meaning, stroke count, radical, etc. It is a great help for learning. Great work !

A unique tool for searching chinese characters for foreign language students. It's easy to read. The book includes all the possible ways of looking for words: by English entries, by Chinese sounds, by stroke counting, by stroke order. The body of the dictionary is designed to illustrate how Chinese characters are actually constructed starting from radicals.

Chinese Characters: A Geneology and Dictionary makes searching for Chinese words easy. The author, Rick Harbaugh, has included six indexes
to help the scholar and learner in what has often been a long, and sometimes futile, search through traditional Chinese dictionaries.
The use of the radical index had been the only option if the pronunciation of the word is unknown.

Harbaugh includes the traditional radical index, a stroke index, a pronunciation index, an English-to-Chinese index, a Chinese index, and an index using the Bopomofo phonetic system.

The dictionary itself is structured around the radical system; all words
derived from the same radical are presented in a geneological tree.
Word combinations, bound forms, are then listed and explained.

Pinyin romanization is used throughout.

I highly recommend Chinese Characters: A Genealogy and Dictionary.
I wish this book had been available when I began my study of Chinese many years ago.

I'm at a real loss as to how this book rated such good reviews. It's possible that it is a good book but I can't tell because the printing is VERY tiny. You would either need the vision of a Barn Owl or a really big magnifying glass just to make out the characters. It's going back tomorrow.

This dictionary is of extreme help for me in learning Chinese. I always loved the etimological approach in language-learning, and this is even more true for Chinese.

When encountering an unknown character, if you recognize any of the components (not only the radical), the search in this dictionary based on these components is easy and fun. I looked up one character, and found myself flipping through several pages for others. Great for getting used to characters: meaning+meaning, meaning+phonetic.

Problem is that if you only know the simplified form and no pinyin or meaning, you'll have difficulty with this dictionary. The simplified forms are given, but you first need to find the traditional one... Sometimes the 'etimological' explanation may not be 100%correct (as other reviewers said).

Altogether, still my most used dictionary when learning!!