Mathews' Chinese-English Dictionary

Rating:
Summary: A useful old dictionary, but be careful with it
Review: Some of the other reviews on this page point out that certain Chinese-Chinese dictionaries are better than Mathews. But that's hardly a fair criticism; you have to compare it to other Chinese-English dictionaries, and those that take the classical language into account are hard to come by. (One work that is rapidly gaining in popularity is the Taiwanese Far East Chinese-English dictionary, which is expanded from an older dictionary compiled by Liang Shih-ch'iu.)

There are several problems with the Mathews dictionary, and the old Romanization is the least of them. More disturbing are Mathews's erroneous pronunciations, which are too frequent. You cannot rely on him at all for tones, for example. In the second edition, the great Y.R. Chao went through all of the entries and corrected many of Mathews's errors--but the press did not re-alphabetize the entries to reflect the corrected pronunciations, so if you are looking up a character with a pronunciation that Mathews happened to get wrong, you'll have to go back and use the stroke index to find it, unless you want to try and guess which mistaken reading Mathews might used. Both alternatives are irritating.

As another reviewer pointed out, Mathews does not provide any historical context for his definitions. One simply cannot tell whether a compound is modern or ancient--or, more dangerously, how the meaning of a compound may have changed over time. To be sure, there is a limit to how comprehensive a one-volume dictionary can be. But it still should be possible to give some brief indication as to whether a particular sense is attested in the classical language.

In sum, this dictionary is still useful, and a student will want it on his or her shelf, but it can be both frustrating and misleading.

Rating:
Summary: Old can be Good
Review: What, is this book still around? This was required classroom material for anybody who studied Chinese prior to 1980. Since then, other material has come out that sometimes has more characters (which is not an accurate indicator of total entries), frequently has newer coinages (but leaves older ones out), usually is smaller (admittedly, Matthews weighs a ton) but probably nothing that is all-around more useful than old Matthews. If you are a serious student of Chinese you should acquire it.

Rating:
Summary: Great for starters, but Chinese sources better down the road
Review: When I first started studying Classical Chinese, I used this book so often that I photocopied the character indexes to save time. However, I haven't opened it too often since those first classes.

The definitions seemed adequate at the time, and it is in English (especially useful when the word is some random object from centuries past), but I found the following things got in my way:

1. It uses an odd spelling system (Wade-Giles is more difficult than pinyin and zhuyin)
2. It sometimes didn't have the depth of the word I was looking for (forcing me to consult Chinese sources -- I should have started off with the Chinese sources.)
3. There is little context for definitions (historical notes or quotes from classical texts).

Although it's a good start, once you're relatively comfortable with modern and classical Chinese, it's probably a good idea to move on to Chinese sources -- at Berkeley we often use Gu hanyu changyong zi zidian for words that we don't need ALL of the information for, and the hanyu da cidian (or zhongwen da cidian, etc.) for stuff that needs lots of detail.