Hello!
So let’s say I encounter a Hanzi (hope I got the name right) that I have not seen before, nor know the meaning of or how it’s pronounced or written in Pinyin (also not a 100% sure about these).
Assume I can not just use the internet. In English I would open the dictionary and look for the meaning of the world by alphabetical order.
How would I find it in a Mandarin dictionary? I assume I won’t have to look through the entire dictionary trying to find the matching symbol.
Thanks in advance!
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There are several ways to look up a character whose pronunciation you don’t know. I’ll describe one. Instead of alphabets, you learn “strokes” — the fundamental components that make up a character when writing it. Even if you’ve not seen or written a character before, these rules can be applied to identify how many strokes it takes to produce a character (like how many letters in a word). Let’s say your character is made of 10 strokes, you look at the index to find out where in the dictionary all the characters that have 10 strokes are.
From there you then conduct a visual search for the character that matches yours. This part can be greatly accelerated by your ability to recognize “radicals” which are regular groupings of strokes — think of these as word roots or prefixes. The index section is often sorted by these radicals (with increasingly complex strokes), but overall stroke count of the character is still 10 as per our example. You go down this list until you find the character you want, which will have its page number listed. You then find the definition on that page.
If you miscount, then you may need to search the index for neighboring stroke-count sections.
Another way to think about it is imagine you have an English dictionary that has an extra index. In this index the words are organized by letter count, then roots (also by letter count), and finally alphabetically.
If you look up “spice” you go to an Index section where all the other 5-letter words are, there it’s sorted alphabetically, and next to “spice” is the page number its definition is on.
Just like how it’s very difficult to find the definition of an English word if you don’t know the order of the alphabets (e.g. a,b,c,d…), it’s incredibly difficult to find the definition of a Chinese character you don’t recognize if you also don’t know how to break the character down into strokes or radicals.
If you know the pronunciation, then it’s a different method/index. But that doesn’t appear to be your question.
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