topics: |  dictionary | china-mandarin | english

What I find fascinating about Chinese dictionaries is their system of
tabulating the radicals (bases or glyphs) in terms of the number of
strokes.  Thus you start with the radical "--" ("one"), and all its derivative
words, and then move on to radicals with more strokes.  The English-Chinese
dictionaries however, usually adopt a alphabetized organization for the
Chinese part (you must know the pinyin literation); or else you can look up
the radical in the prefatory stroke-sorted index of radicals.  This book
includes a large prefatory section aimed at the Chinese learner, with
an introduction to tones, as well as the set of radicals and the Pinyin
romanization.