A Practical English-Chinese Pronouncing Dictionary: English, Chinese Characters, Romanized Mandarin and Cantonese (Tuttle Language Library)

Rating:
Summary: Delighted to find English-Chinese with Bo-Po-Mo
Review: Given the popularity of the Yale series books for learning Chinese in the USA, this dictionary is a real find. In my course of instruction, we are using the Yale series with Yale romanization, but migrating to Bo-Po-Mo (Zhuyin-Fuhao), as part of our progression to reading/writing Chinese. What great fortune to find this dictionary that has both systems! Yes, some words are dated, but this is the only dictionary I could find that provided Mandarin phonetics free from the association with Latin characters.

Rating:
Summary: Do not live up to my standard
Review: I have high hopes for this dictionary when I learned about this dictionary. I bought it because I wanted both Mandarin and Cantonese pronunciations. However, the book does not live up to my high standard. It has too few words to be useful to me. Even in the instance when the word do appear in the dictionary, sometimes I could not find what the phrase that I really wanted. Also, I found the pinyin (Mandarin translation) to be quite unconventional. Cantonese translation, however, is better than what I usually encounter in other books! Recommendation: Look for better dictionary elsewhere.

Rating:
Summary: Useful reference in back, decent main vocab list
Review: This book consists of a long vocabulary list and a reference section. The vocabulary list is kind of old. I got a real kick when I opened its map of China and still see "xikang" province - I did an internet search and found out that this province was split up between Tibet and Sichuan provinces back in the 50's! Kind of shows you the dating of the vocab list, which uses the bopomofo/Yale mandarin romanization (NOT the commonly used Pinyin) and Yale cantonese romanization.

A useful part of the vocab list is that it lists the "spoken" Cantonese pronunciation. For example, a cockcroach is written as jeung1long4, but spoken as gaat6jaat2.

I find myself using the reference section more than the vocubulary list. It includes the pronuncations for christian and bhuddist religious terms, including the books of the bible (protestant & catholic), as well as a list of military terms. It also has lists of Simplified/Traditional Chinese characters, chinese calendar solar terms, summary of chinese dynasties, 100 surnames, and a pretty deep discussion of family relation appellations.