Rating: 
Summary: The Best
Review: This is the best book for learning Chinese characters.If you want to learn Chinese, BUY IT!!!
Rating:
Summary: My desert island dictionary
Review: This is the best! The six indexes at the back make it the most versatile chinese dictionary I have used so far. As well, I have found the genealogical descriptions not only interesting but a helpful "hook" for remembering characters. If I was limited to only one Chinese dictionary (horrors!), this would be it.
Rating:
Summary: Excellent, highly recommend.
Review: This is the most helpful Chinese dictionary I have come across in 2 years of studying the language. The etymological setup is extremely useful, and moreoever it makes it much easier to remember different characters. I highly recommend this to anyone learning the language.
Rating:
Summary: Chinese characters can be fun
Review: This review is long overdue. My copy of Chinese Characters: A Genealogy and Dictionary is already becoming worn with use. It has rapidly become one of my favorite books. Although it may not contain the greatest number of entries, this is inevitably the Chinese dictionary I turn to first, simply because it is so well designed, convenient and miraculously cross-referenced. Any student of Chinese knows that dictionary look-up can be a grave pain: none of the standard look-up methods is very reliable or fast, and many of the best, most complete and authoritative dictionaries are arranged in such a way that use is difficult unless one already knows a host of characters. Rick Harbaugh has taken the wild garden of Chinese characters and made it an enjoyable, fun place for study or sheer wandering. One of the other reviewers here pointedly questions the value and/or accuracy of many of Harbaugh's "etymologies" -- while I am nowhere near linguist enough to refute this reader's claims or otherwise argue with him/her, I guess my response (or question) would be "what does it matter? If the book helps a learner memorize and appreciate the characters, where's the harm?" If you must deal with the characters -- and it is hard to think of Chinese without them, though some have advocated that -- why not at least try to do so in a pleasurable way, with an appreciation for their aesthetic appeal? Reference books that are fun to use and which promote learning are few and far between. Rick Harbaugh's dictionary is certainly one of these. I often find myself on the T in Boston looking up a character or word in Chinese Characters, and subsequently getting lost on a trail that leads from character to character, from form to form, up and down and across the etymologies. It's grand fun, and the pleasure element will help you learn. And there are so many ways to move through the information. Chinese Characters features not only Harbaugh's "zhongwen zipu" etymological chart, but tables of characters arranged by more familiar radicals, pinyin, and stroke order. Most character entries feature references to compounds that contain the character in a position other than the initial one, making this a useful "Reverse" dictionary as well. There is also an English-Chinese index. All of this in about 550 well-designed and close-packed pages. I speak as a relatively new student of Chinese: this book is an absolute steal, and a joy.
Rating:
Summary: Find a character with ease
Review: What a cleverly designed book!
-Search by pinyin (romanization)
-Search by bopomofo (zhuyinfuhao)
-Search the English word list
-Search by THE PART OF THE CHARACTER YOU RECOGNIZE (doesn't have to be the radical)
-Or, ok, search by stroke or radical -Another way to search, not mentioned in other reviews or even in the intro to the book itself: search by looking for a character that goes with the target character (i.e. I have no idea what this character is, but I just saw it printed right after the word for water. Fine, I'll just look up water, and there's my mystery character). And the definitions show plenty of combinations as well. After all, what is a zi (character) by itself? With this book, you will not be squinting through row after row of tiny characters as with, say, the Far East brand dictionary. You can find a word or combination in seconds, I promise. Focuses on "traditional" characters, as used in Taiwan, Hong Kong, etc, the same characters that have been used for the last 2000 years. Also, includes simplified form in brackets, which have been used in Mainland China for 50 years. If you don't care about written Chinese, and you just want to look up what you hear, then John DeFrancis' ABC Dictionary is surely the book for you. (It has simplified characters searchable by pinyin combinations). If you love Chinese writing, and long to look up every word you see, but are tired of asking your friend to explain it to you,
then this book, 'Chinese Characters: A Genealogy and Dictionary
by Rick Harbaugh' is perfect. One thing on the website which is missing from the book: reference numbers linking the character to Wieger's etymology, which (correctly or not) attempts to further explain a character's origins with samples of gu-wen (ancient writing). Notice that this book currently takes 1-2 weeks to ship.
Rating:
Summary: The swiss army knife of Chinese character dictionaries.
Review: You'll might need several dictionaries to be comfortable learning Chinese. This simultaneously phonetic and semantic-based dictionary and character genealogy is too unique not to be in your repertoire. Not only can you search by stroke, radical, pinyin, or English spelling, but also by looking for the part of the character you do regognize and going from there, or by pronounciation, or by bopomofo. Its format is perfect for learning characters and their roots. Presented are 182 root ideographs from which 4000 other characters are derived. Find the character for horse ("ma") and you'll find associated terms which contain that character (e.g. saddle) as well as homophones which have nothing to do with horses but sound somewhat similar to "ma" (e.g. jade, scold, mom). Very well done.
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