[.ca] Pocket Mandarin Chinese Langenscheidt (ISBN 1585730572)

very good over all but a few things missing:
This is the best Chinese dictionary I could find when I shopped around at several local bookstores. It covers simplified Chinese organized first by pinyin romanization and then by tones, which is generally helpful except when looking up multicharacter words because all entires starting with the same character do not always fall together. The type face is very clear and easy to read and the entries are clearly laid out, presenting all the necessary information (including liberal usage notes) with no frills (such as pronunciation of English words, etc.) It is clearly designed more for English speakers than Chinese speakers. The vocabulary seems up to date (including, for instance, DVD) and also includes all the "dirty" words that prudish editors leave out. The book focuses on words used in mainland China but has a three-page appendix of Taiwanese equivalents of some terms. I like the small size of this dictionary, and the plastic cover means it's probably durable enough to survive being carried around in a book bag quite a bit. My main gripe is that "Chinese Characters: A Genealogy and Dictionary" spoiled me--I miss the character etymologies and having multiple indicies for looking up characters, but in practice the single radical index in this dictionary seems to work just as well if not better. I gave this dictionary four stars instead of five because I would have liked some treatment of traditional characters, an appendix listing measure words like in the compact Oxford dictionary, and information about parts of speech that more closely reflects Chinese grammar instead of just the standard English parts of speech.

The Perfect Dictionary For China:
I took a quick course in conversational Chinese. Being a bad student, all I really learned was basic phrases and how to read pinyin. Suddenly I was offered a chance to go to Shanghai for two months to stay with a friend of my Chinese teacher. His friend ran a middle school and wanted an American to talk with the students. I agreed, but between the time I agreed and when I arrived in Shanghai, the agreement changed from talking with the students to teaching four hours of classes a day! Having very bad Chinese skills (almost none), this was a little daunting. I somehow managed to get through teaching 13 year-old Chinese students with only a few years of English training, even while I knew almost no Chinese. There is one main reason I was able to do this: Langenscheidt's Pocket Chinese Dictionary. This book saved me every day, and that is no exaggeration. The book gives single words, but it also gives common phrases in which that word is used. The radical index is pretty good, though like others have said, it leaves some characters out. Most of the ones I couldn't find were (I discovered) local characters used mostly in the Shanghai area. When I was standing around trying to read signs, I often would consult this book. Since I had a conversation class, I didn't know how to read anything when I arrived. Once I was able to learn how to pick out a radical, though, I was usually able to find out what the word was just by using this dictionary. During class, when I had written an English word on the board and wanted to write the Chinese word, all I had to do was look up the English word in here. You not only will find the Chinese pinyin next to it, but also the character(s) for writing it. When I wanted to find something, I could do the same thing. Even if I didn't say the pinyin right, I could point to the characters in the book, and almost always people would immediately know what it was and would help me get it. Like others have said, the cover is rubbery, and stands up well to wear and tear. As I accidentally found out, this also means you can cover it with marker writings, or spill coffee and tea on the cover, yet it will wipe away clean. In the back of the book is a quick number section for dealing with all numbers, big and small. It also shows you the characters for writing numbers on checks, which are different than the characters for the regular use of numbers. The book also has the Chinese way of saying a lot of useful in-country phrases, like Communist Party, CCTV, People's Republic of China, and other things like that. It has slang and formal words in it, and covers thousands of words. I cannot believe how many things the dictionary has. I was teaching 13 year-olds, and like most kids that age, they wanted to know how to say some rather weird phrases in English. When they would write the Chinese, I could use the radical chart and look it up. Or, if they spoke it, I could find the pinyin using the Chinese side of the dictionary. I still cannot believe how many seemingly random words were in there. I'd say I could find any word (and I mean ANY word) about 95% of the time (one notable lack I found one day: "caravan" - can't have them all I guess). It is amazing. I have put this book to the test. The sides of the pages are covered in dirt. The blue L on the front is slowly starting to wear off (not surprising after all I put it through). Physically, as well as language-wise, this book is great. I used it every day, flipping through and referencing it nearly non-stop. It has pulled me through every time. I've never really used another dictionary much, but I've never really had to. This one is great. If you are going to China and need a quick, handy, durable, and travel-friendly dictionary, this is what you want. Believe me, after two intense months of being one of the few English-speakers in a suburb of Shanghai, I know for a fact, this dictionary is good. Get it. You won't be disappointed.

Probably The Best, Still Not Ideal.:
I've been studying Chinese in Suzhou (Jiangsu State) for about 4 months now, and of all the dictionaries I've bought this one has the most China-street-grime on it's pages. It is my everyday dictionary, I use it all the time. It's layout is nice and clean, no eye straining here, the character lookup uses a nice big font. I LOVE the tough rubber cover, it's nice and rugged. Wishlist: 1: A Traditional character lookup. 2: A Stroke order index for characters with obscure radicals (the ABC Dictionary has this). Many of the very most common characters have very weird radicals. 3: Markings for the different types of Chinese parts of speech, as a previous reviewer also noted, the parts of speech in Chinese are a little different. For example: "tiaowu" means "to dance", but is it's "le" form "tiaowule" or "tiaolewu"? Help us out here folks, just mark it as a splittable verb. 4: Update the vocab. When you wanna say "cell phone" you say "shouji", but that's not the word they give, and in fact if you go to lookup "shouji" it's not there. All in all though this book has the most up to date lexicon of any of the dictionaries that I've seen. And like a previous reviewer said, it has all the words that other prudist editors leave out. 5: More usage notes on the grammer type words, less on the nouns, I don't need usage notes for "banana" or whatever, but i would really like it if they told me how to use "chule" (kinda like "unless" but not exactly) 6:Mark which single character entires can be used alone and which must be used in combo with other characters. But for Pete's sake DON'T get rid of the single character entries, they are invaluble for learning Chinese, even if you can't use them on their own. More single character entries would be better. 6:Do a little more research on the frequency of words, I always end up sounding \obad\c cause I use some stodgy word, while the dictionary doesn't even HAVE the common way to say it. 7:Mark written-vs-spoken words. Chinese has a big split in the written and spoken languages. Hmm, everyday I think of other ways to improve this dictionary, but the fact that I use it everyday tells you something, the other dictionaries sit at home on my shelf.

OUTRAGEOUSLY GOOD:
I found this dictionary very help for beginning Mandarin. I thought I once bought a better dictionary but they are almost exactly the same. I reccomend this dictionary to anyone.

Extremely well organized and quite comprehensive:
For a while, I'd been searching for a good Chinese dictionary to accompany my classes, and the ones I had looked at did not strike me as very well organized. Considering the complexity of written Chinese, organization is everything. A secondary (but still very important) requirement for me was that whatever dictionary I ended up with be durable. Langenscheidt's pocket dictionary definitely fits the bill on both counts. This dictionary has it all: a Chinese-English section ordered by pronunciation, an English-Chinese section featuring numerous usage examples for many words, an excellent radical index, a guide to common differences between mainland Chinese and the Chinese used in Taiwan, and an overview of numbers in Chinese. I'm especially pleased with the plentiful examples throughout the dictionary, which can eliminate much of the mystery of how to use the words/characters in a colloquial fashion. All the entries are very clear and readable, and despite their size, the script characters are quite legible. If I had to pick something to complain about (and this is a bit of a stretch), it would be the lack of traditional Chinese characters in this dictionary. In my classes, we learn the traditional characters, but it is not a big deal to learn the simplified versions along the way (especially since out of the 100 or so characters covered each semester, only a handful differ between traditional and simplified Chinese). What more can I say? This dictionary has it all as far as information goes, and the rubbery cover and excellent binding just scream "durability" to me. I have no doubt that this will be a tool I keep by my side for years to come, both in the classroom and in my travels to China itself. HIGHLY recommended.