Oxford Picture Dictionary English-Chinese Edition: Bilingual Dictionary for Chinese-speaking teenage and adult students of English (Oxford Picture Dictionary Second Edition)
Reviews (214)
NOT IDEAL for Mandarin students, Great for ESL/ELD and Heritage Language Learners
Simplified/Traditional? Traditional character system (Taiwan/ Hong Kong/ Overseas Chinese populations) Pinyin? NONE, not even in an index form. You will have to use another dictionary tool to look up pinyin. This could work because if you're learning Cantonese, you can write in your own romanization system Grammar? Some in English, NONE IN CHINESE. Your Chinese needs to good enough to integrate new vocabulary into your existing grammatical knowledge Topics? Adult communicative opportunities in daily life Good for kids? Not at all, unless you have an incredible precocious child who wants to learn how to talk about their constitutional rights in Chinese Ideal Target Audience? Mostly ESL teachers and students, although heritage language learners can also benefit tremendously. The Oxford Picture Dictionary (English/Chinese) ranges from a decent to outright outstanding picture dictionary, depending on what you're using it for. The word "picture dictionary" can seem misleading because you may think this is marketed for kids or beginning learners. True, it has artistic renderings accompanying the words although less charming than say the "Times Goes By" series or Usborne's First Thousand Words/First Hundred Words books. This book was conceived, developed and intended to be used with adult audiences and features a variety of themes from everyday "adult" life such as trips to the bank, the office setting, emergency procedures and legal system jargon. These bits of information are far more useful when a house fire hits or when you get thrown into the slammer, compared to if you studied Usborne's First 1000 Words and memorized all farm animals on the page. Because seriously, how many times are you going to identify an bear in your daily life? So now, the issue here is WHAT ARE YOU LOOKING TO USE THIS BOOK FOR? Are you learning Mandarin? Are you teaching ESL? This books has a myriad of uses and can be adaptable for any one of them, depending on how you, the USER, approaches it. So let's look at the options. #1. You are learning Mandarin Chinese as a second language: This dictionary is not ideal, but can work if you want it to. The pictures are colored, nice, bright and large and there are a variety of less commonly used vocabulary words (e.g. dental hygienist, wood stain) that you won't find in those cutesy beginner books that almost always include colors, numbers and family members. And the text is approachable and more easily digestible compared to standard Chinese paper dictionaries. True, there is no pinyin but this could be a positive because with the presence of pinyin, a lot of learners overly rely on reading the letters instead of focusing exclusively on character recognition. You will have to research the pinyin, stroke order, radical and all that basic stuff on your own time, but that's what a reference book is for: for you to fill with your own individualized information. I don't consider the lack of pinyin a negative because too many beginners overly rely on them. There are plenty of cheap books and free internet tools where you can look up or draw the character and get the pinyin that way. Also reading this dictionary will help you develop phono-semantic awareness of Chinese characters (yes it is possible to "sound" out a Chinese character once your vocabulary is expansive enough to recognize the patterns). You will need a late intermediate to early advanced language knowledge to effectively use this book, but it's not outside of your reach. Proceed with caution and this cannot be used in isolation, but it's a good and cheap addition to your library. #2. You are a heritage Chinese language learner who speaks Mandarin relatively fluently but wants to learn how to read: Considering you have an early intermediate reading knowledge and an advanced speaking/listening fluency, this could be the perfect book for you. It does not have pinyin, but that can be good because this can aid and reinforce character recognition. It uses common communicative Chinese and depending on your background, you should have extensive information about any number of their themes. Since you're a heritage learner, your understanding of grammar should be decent and you can use new vocabulary with little difficulty in daily conversation and writing. This book isn't targeted for heritage learners, but could serve as an useful tool. #3. You are an ESL teacher who is looking for resources for your students who come from Mandarin speaking/Chinese backgrounds: Lucky you, ESL is the intended target audience of these Oxford series. If you want to provide your students with an additional supplement for vocabulary building, then this picture dictionary is good. It has a lot of pertinent "immigrant student" topics such as concepts on citizenship tests, driver licenses and job searching. The text also has conversation and dialogue guides which can be worked on individually or in pairs. It has a pronunciation guide, although it uses IPA and I'm not sure how useful that can be for a lot of ESL students out there. This definitely needs to be used in conjunction with another high quality textbook, but can be helpful for students to study on their own and reference to. And in case you're wondering, I'm a heritage Chinese language learner who teaches high school ESL and Mandarin Chinese. I bought this dictionary mostly for my own reference but I can see it working in my Mandarin classroom as a study guide or even used to draft test questions. If I were to teach with it, I would have to add my own information (pinyin, stroke order, radical, etc.), but like any reference book, you need to make it your own before it is useful in any situation.
Picture dictionary
This book contains a lot of words/phrases in daily living activities and interaction with people. This works fine for me because I already know the Chinese alphabet (Bopomofo system) and know how to look up in my Chinese-English dictionary on the pronunciation of each character (zhuyin). This book would be difficult for those who were taught the pingyin method of pronunciation because this book only shows the translation into Chinese characters but does not include either zhuyin or the pingyin (Chinese or sound-translated phonetic). This book is geared toward Chinese learning English instead of English-speaking students learning Chinese. I still don't understand why non-Chinese speaking students are taught the pingyin method of pronunciation instead of teaching them directly the alphabet (bopomofo which is the first 4 alphabet letters). Pingyin method is only the sound translation of a character. The students would not know how to look up from a Chinese-English dictionary. Whereas by learning the bopomofo alphabet, one knows how to pronounce a word; it's like once you know the English alphabet, you can more or less figure out the pronunciation no matter which way the alphabet letters are combined.
If you are Chinese and wish to learn English, this is a "must have' book.
My wife is Chinese and is in America less than a year. Her English skills were pretty poor when she came here, but her English skills are what I would fairly call at good level now, and we can talk in detail about most subjects. A large part of her ability to learn English, from such a dissimilar language as Mandarin, was the use of this book. The professor in one of her English classes recommended this book. My wife finds it of particular value in helping her learn English, and she takes it everywhere she goes in the hope she will have time to study English. It is packed with pictures with both the English and Mandarin (in Chinese symbols) names for each item. It is organized by sections beginning with Everyday Language, People, Housing, Food, Clothing, Health, Community, Transportation, Work, Areas of Study, Plants and Animals, and Recreation. She considers this book to be one of her most valuable resources to help her learn and improve her English skills.
Excellent choice, but....
My ONLY criticism of this well designed book is the Chinese is written in traditional Chinese characters and not simplified. There is a difference making it difficult for some students. I still gave it 5 stars.
BEST BY FAR book for Chinese long term visitor or new resident to USA
This BY FAR is the best book for my newly adopted sons (ages 12 & 13) from China used to understand English and situations here in USA. There are categories of subjects with 1) English word 2) Chinese word 3) Picture of subject/situation. It is set up in categories too so you can learn more about which category/situation would help you the best. We would review the situation (what is a party, civic duty, occupations, etc.) Sometimes I would give them assignments to memorize 1-2 pages and then we would have a quiz on those pages. The boys used their ipads to learn pronounciation and then we went over it together. It gives you something besides flashcards (which we do too) to help them learn common words/situations that will be helpful to them. I think this would be good for persons 10+ to adult coming to the USA to live or visit long term.
Learn Chinese basics
Great book
Beginner learning
Very useful for Beginner English learning. It has both English and Chinese words also pictures. Easy to understand.
The worst pictionary I've ever seen.
It didn't even have "jade" in it. It stunk.
very helpful to learn basic English vocabulary
I don't know any Chinese, but I am able to teach a Chinese speaking student, with no English, the basic vocabulary of everyday life. All the pictures are labeled in English and Chinese. Pictures are of everyday settings and places. It also allows you to go beyond just words into phrases and sentences. Great for home study as well.
I love it! A dictionary with pictures!
It is very useful for people who don't know English very well and new to US. Bilingual dictionary helps people understand well both in English and Chinese. This is a picture dictionary, and easy to understand either for students or adults. If you want to learn Chinese or English, this is a best choice for you.
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