Rating: 
Summary: Repeat customer
Review: I think this is a very useful tool for learning Chinese characters. As any student of Chinese knows, you will always need more than one dictionary - they all have different specialties - this one is affordable, comprehensive, compact, and the multiple methods of searching for characters and cross referencing make it easy to use. In Australia I have found it difficult to find character dictionaries in traditional characters - I have a really good 'giant' dictionary which is impractical to carry around, but it uses simplified characters and only has a table of traditional characters in the back - not much help if you're learning to write traditional characters. It actually took about 6 weeks for me to receive it in Australia, but it arrived just before I went to Taiwan on a study trip. I took it to show the Chinese teacher, and she was so impressed - she had never seen a dictionary arranged so well - that I gave it to her. Now I have to order another and one for my Chinese class classmate. I'm pleased to note that Amazon now has the book shipping in 1-2 weeks, I won't have to rely on my simplified dictionary for too long. Highly recommended study tool.
Rating:
Summary: Great for beginning and advanced students
Review: I was a total beginner when i first got this book. I have been totally blown away with how easy it is to use and how helpful it is. Being able to find characters from the pinyin, english, stroke counts, and so many other ways is so invaluable. My only reccomendation would be for a little bit more clear definition of the terms in it. But it is definitely a 5 out of 5 star book. If you are seriously studying chinese you have to get this book.
Rating:
Summary: Great book - does NOT violate Linguistics 101
Review: If you want to know the Chinese script better, this is where to go! This book has been immensely useful and just plain fun. If you want to test-drive it, the entire content is on the web (Amazon doesn't allow URLs here, but search for the title at Yahoo). I'm not an expert linguist, but I've studied enough of it to refute "A reader from New England , November 23, 1998." He calls Harbaugh's etymologies "cute graphic stories" -- well, I've studied Chinese calligraphy since the age of 9, and there's proof for these "stories" in the older scripts like Zhuan and Li. In these millenium-old scripts, the pictographic elements have hardly mutated at all, so identifying parts is a far more certain thing. The reader from New England thinks that Harbaugh aims to provide the etymology of oral speech, which is what most linguists would do with most languages. But he's not doing that. Lots of us take it for granted that scripts are phonetic, so that there wouldn't really be any etymology of the written language as opposed to the oral speech. But the Chinese writing system is pictographic. The script has a phonetic component, but that's only a part of the thought processes that went into creating ideographs. Does anyone really think that the people who invented the written character "to steal" -- "salivate" (over) "vases" -- got a chance to talk to their ancestors who invented the spoken word "dao4"? Nope -- what this book does is to identify the "salivate" and "vases" parts of the character, and tell us why they combine into "to steal".
Rating:
Summary: Get It! (& Ignore the Cunning-Linguist from New England)
Review: In my opinion, this is the most useful dictionary that a new student of Chinese can own! By provinding a hierarchical structure for the organization of Chinese characters the author greatly assists the student in understanding and remembering what s/he is studying. Just ignore the comments from the cunning-linguist from New England. The Chinese language is very much symbol based rather than oral based. Much more like mathematics than the Western alphabet. In fact the expression in Chinese "to speak Chinese" is literally translated as "to speak Chinese writing". Don't fall for the "Linguistics 101" party line. Unlike physics, there are no "universal laws" of writing. Only dogmatic opinions that are presented as "theories" (which btw they're not, since they're not falsifiable). The bottom line: if you're studying Chinese, get the book. Regards, Audrius Stundzia
Rating: 
Summary: A Warning!
Review: Indeed this new dictionary is quite a well put together piece, well arranged and aesthetically appealing. And these are its good qualities. Sadly, having set out to create a dictionary of Chinese word etymologies, this editor fell prey to the seductive charm of cute graphic stories, one or several existing for each character. Since these graphic stories only attempt to explain the graphical structure of a character, making no reference to the SPOKEN word each character represents, they are fundamentally wrong (linguistics 101 folks; Chinese isn't exempt from the universal laws of writing). And misleading for the beginning student, the editor references many legitimate sources of Chinese word etymology, yet himself STILL ignores their content in favor of the fluffy stuff. Ah, and what we have lost to popular appeal...you have been warned!
Rating:
Summary: The best dictionary I've seen
Review: Like many of you, I'm certain, I have purchased more Chinese dictionaries than I care to remember - each one serving a different purpose. Not only is this dictionary the best all around resource for the student of Chinese, it is one of my favorite books in general. It's character etymology is that interesting, and I can't think of another book that contains as much useful information. This one also contains more words and phrases than any other I've seen. My only complaint is that simplified characters are not included in the word combinations following each single-character entry. For those of us learning simplified characters, when you look up a multiple-character word or phrase and need to write it, you will have to reference each character individually, beyond the first one, in order to know how the phrase or compound is written on the Mainland. But this slight flaw in no way diminishes the ingenuity and practicality of this book, especially as a single-source reference for both writing and speaking Chinese. For anyone studying or traveling in China or Taiwan, you will not need to bring any other dictionary. This is the one. If you love Chinese, you really can't go on without Zhongwen Zipu.
Rating:
Summary: There is no better Chinese dictionary
Review: Like many of you, I'm certain, I have purchased more Chinese dictionaries than I care to remember - each one serving a different purpose. Not only is this dictionary the best all around resource for the student of Chinese, it is one of my favorite books in general. It's character etymology is that interesting, and I can't think of another book that contains as much useful information. This one also contains more words and phrases than any other I've seen. My only complaint is that simplified characters are not included in the word combinations following each single-character entry. For those of us learning simplified characters, when you look up a multiple-character word or phrase and need to write it, you will have to reference each character individually, beyond the first one, in order to know how the phrase or compound is written on the Mainland. But this slight flaw in no way diminishes the ingenuity and practicality of this book, especially as a single-source reference for both writing and speaking Chinese. For anyone studying or traveling in China or Taiwan, you will not need to bring any other dictionary. This is the one. If you love Chinese, you really can't go on without Zhongwen Zipu.
Rating:
Summary: If it works, use it
Review: Rick Harbaugh's dictionary is a great book with which to begin learning Chinese characters. The etymologies are extremely helpful in analyzing the different components of characters and helping you remember the meaning so that you will be able to differentiate the character you learned from other similar characters. The book has been previously criticized for inaccurate etymologies to which I answer "What a bunch of hooie!" If I were the leading scholar on the Chinese language and its history, then I might be worried about this. If I were such a person, I wouldn't even need the book. But since I am just an American Born Chinese trying to learn enough of the written language so that I can read the newspapers and not get lost when I visit the East, the use of etymologies (even if not entirely accurate) is an excellent trick to remember more characters.
I showed this book to my father (who is able to read and write classical Chinese characters) and he wanted a copy for himself.
Rating:
Summary: Excellent and orginal concept
Review: Rick Harbaugh's Etymological dictionary fills a necessary gap for all students of the Chinese language.
Rating:
Summary: An excellent reference for students of Chinese characters.
Review: The best thing about this book is that it provides explanations that help the student make sense of the elements in each Chinese character. To the best of my knowledge, these are not made-up fantasies, but based on established Chinese etymologies. But for the student, the important point is that the etymologies assist in committing the characters to memory. Moreover, in addition to the etymologies, the book not only provides examples of the character in compounds, but also includes references to compounds where it appears as the second element, making it an excellent tool for learning new vocabulary. Although it is not primarily a dictionary, the arrangement and indexes mean that one can use it that way. I wish my teachers had taught me in accordance with the explanations in this book when I started studying Chinese 20+ years ago. I still find it useful as an aid to learning characters & their compounds.
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