2008 Woodie Awards
Faculty member to publish Chinese dictionary
Roger Sauerhaft
Issue date: 4/22/08 Section: Campus
About two years ago, current Confucius Institute director and professor of Chinese, Quanyu Huang, noticed one of his 200-level students struggling to look up characters in a textbook and the realization hit him to write his own dictionary.
"I did a survey among 300 Chinese students (at Miami) and only two used Chinese dictionaries," said Huang. "I found that Chinese dictionaries were only designed for the Chinese to use, not for the American students."
Currently, with Chinese being a character-based language, American students must be able to look at each character and know the sound associated with it. The dictionaries have the sounds organized phonetically in English (called Pinyin) from A to Z.
As Huang noted, this becomes highly problematic when a student does not know the sound or the definition, at which point, they are relegated to simply searching through the entire book.
Another problem Huang cited is that in English, each word is separate and easy to recognize. For Chinese, on the contrary, everything is strung together and distinguishing words is difficult to learn.
Huang said that his dictionary, organized by the number of strokes within each character, is something that has yet to be tried and fixes all of the aforementioned problems.
"(Readers) only need about 10 minutes to learn how to use this (stroke format)," Huang said. "My dictionary also has many example sentences that not only explain the words, but also the culture. For example, in China, 'left-wing' means conservative. It also includes measure words which are hard to remember."
Huang's work has drawn the interest of several prominent publishers, including McGraw-Hill.
The dictionary includes four sections: the primary one for finding characters based on stroke counts, one for translating English to Chinese, one in Pinyin and one for traditional characters. Currently it stands at approximately 900 pages in length, something Huang said is subject to change based on decisions by the publisher.
"I did a survey among 300 Chinese students (at Miami) and only two used Chinese dictionaries," said Huang. "I found that Chinese dictionaries were only designed for the Chinese to use, not for the American students."
Currently, with Chinese being a character-based language, American students must be able to look at each character and know the sound associated with it. The dictionaries have the sounds organized phonetically in English (called Pinyin) from A to Z.
As Huang noted, this becomes highly problematic when a student does not know the sound or the definition, at which point, they are relegated to simply searching through the entire book.
Another problem Huang cited is that in English, each word is separate and easy to recognize. For Chinese, on the contrary, everything is strung together and distinguishing words is difficult to learn.
Huang said that his dictionary, organized by the number of strokes within each character, is something that has yet to be tried and fixes all of the aforementioned problems.
"(Readers) only need about 10 minutes to learn how to use this (stroke format)," Huang said. "My dictionary also has many example sentences that not only explain the words, but also the culture. For example, in China, 'left-wing' means conservative. It also includes measure words which are hard to remember."
Huang's work has drawn the interest of several prominent publishers, including McGraw-Hill.
The dictionary includes four sections: the primary one for finding characters based on stroke counts, one for translating English to Chinese, one in Pinyin and one for traditional characters. Currently it stands at approximately 900 pages in length, something Huang said is subject to change based on decisions by the publisher.
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