Do the Chinese and Japanese have a dictionary? If so, how do they determine the order of the "words"?

Answer 1

Japanese has three sets of "alphabets" that it uses. Two (katakana and hiragana) are phonetic, and so they can be organized in a system very similar to our own alphabetic order. If you know how a word is pronounced, you can always look up a word in this manner, and most online Japanese dictionaries will use this system.

However, Japanese also uses Chinese characters (kanji). For kanji, the original way to look them up is by radical, some part of the character that may or may not somewhat capture its "root" meaning. This really does sound as awful as it sounds. For some characters, it's very easy to figure out what the radical is. For some, there are a few possibilities, but at least you have some idea. For some, you just have no clue. (Along with speech and essay competitions, my Chinese school had a competition for how quickly you could look things up in the dictionary!)

Once you have the radical, all of the characters that have that radical are sorted by stroke count. Usually, the dictionary will have a page with all of the characters of a certain stroke count that indexes the pages with the definitions.

As I said, this is the traditional way of looking up Chinese characters. But there are easier options nowadays.

Kodansha's Kanji Learner's Dictionary uses what I find to be a brilliant method known as the "skip" method. With that, you simply divide the character as it seems most logical (most characters can be divided into left-right, up-down, or around-within). The characters are grouped by the left/top/outside part, and then sorted by stroke count. It is infinitely faster than radicals, especially for non-native students, since guessing radicals requires a certain amount of "intuition" about the language.

You've noticed that the "skip" method still requires stroke counts. This can be tricky, too, since you have to know how the character is written. (Consider what looks like a square, a common unit in Chinese characters. Is it written in one stroke? Four? Actually, it's written in three.)

A purely visual method is multi-radical searching, a method implemented by the WWWJDIC
http://www.csse.monash.edu.au/~jwb/wwwjdic.html
You just choose all of the radicals that are found in the character, without caring which one is the "right" one. You can also limit the search by stroke count, if you want to.

Answer 2

Yes, Chinese and Japanese do have a dictionary. Since I have many Chinese dictionaries at home, I'll tell you how the words are organised in them. There are two main kinds of Chinese dictionaries. One is called 字典 (zidian) which is a "character dictionary". It lists all the characters and tells you the meanings of all the individual characters. The other kind is called 词典 (cidian) which is a "word dictionary". It lists all the characters and also all the words (usually made up of two or more characters) and tells you the meanings of all these characters and words. The characters in these dictionaries are arranged by their hanyupinyin (sound) in alphabetical order. So, a character that starts with the "a" sound will be found at the first few pages of the dictionary while a character that starts with the "z" sound will be found at the last few pages of the dictionary. If you know the sound of the character you are searching for, you can just go by alphabetical order to find the character. If not, you can go by the long and rather tedious method of counting the strokes of the character.

Answer 3

someone's already answered the Japanese question: Basically there's three writing systems, but they are phonetic and therefore organized by sound

Chinese is a little different. Because Chinese is not written phonetically (meaning a character represents a sound) it is not organized by such. BUT....Chinese characters are based on something called Radicals...there's I think 100-200 radicals. If you were to look closely at written Chinese you'll notice that while the over-all picture is different, a small part is the same. This is your 'radical' (which means of or relating to the root)

Virtually all Chinese characters start with a 'radical' and then other lines, dashes, etc modify the meaning of that radical to the specific term. A good is example is that there is a radical for thin-slice. This radical is part of the character for film (as in movies--which were on thin strips of paper) photograph and sheet of paper.

As technology grows, so does the distance from a collection of radicals and their initial meaning. This means that you need to know the 'concept' of a word to look it up or you need to know how it's written before you'll find it in a dictionary. I could never effictively look up words in a chinese dictionary.

so your answer: Chinese dictionaries are organized by Radical

Answer 4

Each Chinese character contains strokes. Some of these strokes in a character is identified as a principal part. Characters of the same principal part are grouped under one category. For example:

Under the category of the principal part +, there are characters, arranged by the no. of strokes in ascending order, 十(ten) 千(thousand) 廿(twenty-)卅(thirty-)升(rise) 午 (afternoon)......

You can see that in each of these character, there's a principal part + in it.

Some dictionaries use the pinyin system which romanizes the sound of the Chinese characters and arrange them alphabetically.

Answer 5

Yes, there are Japanese dictionaries and the words are arranged by their own alphabet.

Answer 6

The Japanese have three dictionaries: one for Kanji, one for Hiragana, and one for Katakana. The Hiragana and Katakana are easy to organize by individual sound, such as words starting with "pa", "ba", "ka", etc. The Kanjis, which are pictograms representing words, actions and concepts, are organized by "radicals" because each Kanji has a part called the radical that is common with other Kanjis. For example there is a ladder-shaped radical that stands for the moon (pronounced tsuki), and hundreds of Kanjis that have this radical as part of their design. Japanese have to memorize each Kanji, of which there are thousands, but the radicals help organize them and help with their translation into meanings.

Answer 7

The Cat isn't vegetarian neither is he a cannibal, so no. The Cat is amazingly specific of himself and could not enable an elementary asian guy or woman take great factor approximately him. besides, They be responsive to The Cat is of Asian decent, so might in no way attempt to screw him over. additionally, The Cat in no way cries (except this is exceeded time for supper.)

Answer 8

Yes, and like english, the Dictionary does not help you with word structure, that is taught at school.

Typically it's in reverse order than what English uses.

Answer 9

They have an alphabet just like us. It's just different characters. There are lots of other alphabets besides ours.

Answer 10

Not only do they have dictionaries, they have alphabets. Gee, just like us, but different. I hope that answers your question.