Chinese Buddhist split off to ntireader.org

Apologies to chinesenotes.com users that I have not updated this blog in a very long time.

My main work recently has been to move all the Buddhist content to http://ntireader.org. The Buddhist content was becoming so much that it has overwhelmed the site as a Chinese language resource. I also thought that Buddhist users of the site may appreciate a separate site dedicated to Buddhist texts and that non-Buddhist users may appreciate less religious content in using chinesenotes.com as a language resources.

The look and feel of  http://ntireader.org is improved and the structure is more modern. It is serving as a model for chinesenotes.com. The underlying word dictionary is largely the same, although the two may be a little out of sync.

Also, I have open sourced the web site. You can find the content and source on GitHub at https://github.com/alexamies/chinesenotes.com. I did not have a reliable, versioned place to store content and source before, so I have placed it there.

Disambiguating different senses of a Chinese word

Chinese is a rich language with a long history and this leads to words that have many different meanings.  That is, the same character or combination of characters has different meanings in different contexts.  There are two different cases of this: (a) a homonym, where the words are truly different, and (b) polysemy, where there a multiple related senses of the word.  Chinese is a little different from languages, like English, where more-or-less phonetic spellings are used because the same character may have multiple different pronunciations.  In fact, 'spelling' does not really apply to Chinese. Determining the correct meaning for a word in a particular sentence or other context is called word-sense disambiguation.

In this post I will describe how to use the www.chinesenotes.com dictionary to find the different meanings of Chinese words.  Chinese words with the same character(s) may different in traditional forms, pronunciation, sense, and meaning.

Let's look at an example, the character 是 (pinyin: shì), which is one of the most common words in Chinese that most often means 'is.'  There are six different  meanings found for this character, as shown in the screenshot below.

Word-sense disambiguation for 是

The character is entered into the search text field (1, in red) and the Search button clicked, showing the results below.  The simplified and traditional characters are shown (2, 3).  In this case both simplified and traditional are the same but there are often differences with the same simplified character mapping to different traditional characters.  An example is the character 台 (pinyin: tái).  This simplified character is equivalent to the traditional characters 台, 臺, 檯, 臺,颱, depending on the context.

The Mandarin pronunciation is shown under the Pinyin column (4).  Again, this example has the same pronunciation for each meaning but this is not always the case.  The character 行 has the possible pronunciations xíng, háng, hàng, and hèng, again, depending on context.

The English translation of the word is given under the English column (5).  The different English words separated by '/' (6) represent different approximations to the same meaning of the Chinese word.  There is not often a one-to-one relationship between Chinese and English words so usually several English words are given.  This also aids in translation by providing the translator with a few choices.  Different lines represent different words.  For example, the first meaning of 是 is 'is' and the second means 'is precisely.'  These are different but related senses.  An example, of the first may be: 你好，我是王。(Hello, I am Wang).  An example of the second may be: A: 我觉得你你不是王。(I don't think that you are Wang.)  B: 我是王。(I am Wang.)  If we look at a good Chinese-Chinese dictionary you will probably find about 20 different entries for 是.  However, many of them are even more closely related than this.

The grammatical function of the word under the column Grammar (7) can more information to help disambiguate the word.  For example, the forth sense of 是 is a pronoun, meaning 'this' or 'that.'  Clearly, this is a totally different meaning.  If click on the simplified Chinese text them the detailed information for that meaning shows that it is a classical Chinese word.  In fact, it was not until the modern Chinese era that 是 had the meaning 'is.'

Finally, there are notes (8) to help explain and differentiate the different meanings and senses.

Finding useful information about a Chinese word

The www.chinesenotes.com dictionary has lots of useful information about Chinese words.  In this post I am going to explain some of the basic information returned.  Even though this information is basic it is not in any online Chinese-English dictionaries that I am aware of.

Let's look at an example.  Try looking up the Chinese word 句子 (pinyin: jùzi, English: sentence) in basic mode.  A screen shot is shown below.

Screenshot of result returned from a simple search

The input is shown near the number 1 (in red).  The text returned in large text is the simplified Chinese text.  The traditional text is also shown (2).  In this case there is no traditional text shown so the result is the same as the simplified.  In other words 句子 is the same in both simplified and traditional text.

The grammar (3) is shown beneath the traditional text .  There is a hyperlink around the text for the grammar to see more detail about the part of speech this word is.  In this case the word is a noun and that information may be enough for you.  This link will be more useful if the part of speech is something that there is no equivalent of in English grammar.


Synonyms (4) are shown below grammar.  In this case, there is one synonym (语句).  There is a hyperlink to the synonyms for convenience in following the link.  In some cases, for words with many different meanings, there are many different meanings so that synonym relationships are not as obvious.  For these words the synonyms, if there are any, are described in the notes.

The topic (5) is the general area of vocabulary that the word belongs to.  In this case the word relates to the 'Language' topic.  The topic can help differentiate the meaning of a word and the context that it is most likely to be used in.  This word is most likely to be used when we are talking about language.

A measure word is similar to a classifier in English but it are not optional in Modern Chinese.  They must be used in front of nouns and the correct measure word must be used.  The appropriate measure word is noted in (6) with a hyperlink to the definition.

An example sentence is given in (7).  This can be very useful if you are trying to use this word in your own Chinese text composition.

Using chinesenotes.com as a English-Chinese dictionary

You can use the chinesenotes.com dictionary as an English-Chinese dictionary by searching on English terms and looking for matching Chinese words. The most basic way to do this is to enter English into the search text field (1) and click on the Search button (2) . This is shown in the screenshot below. A list of matching Chinese words and their English translations will be listed (3).

Screenshot searching on English using basic search

If you did not find the result that you expected keep reading. The results returned from basic search are based on an exact match on the English word. To broaden this to include any word that is contained within the English description follow the steps in the screenshot below. Click on the Advanced link (2) to shown the Advanced options and click on Part-of (substring) search (3). Enter the search term (1) and click on the Search button (4) as before. The results are shown below (5).

Screenshot searching on English using part-of search

Notice in this example that there was only one Chinese word that was an exact match for the search text 'help' but 45 words that had 'help' as a part of the English entry. This is typical because synonyms and functional words, such as 'a', 'to', and so on often appear in the English description of Chinese words so it is most useful to search on any part of the English text. Exact match, the default, is more useful when searching for a Chinese word.

No matches found

If you do not get any matches found in your search for Chinese words at http://www.chinesenotes.com try searching in phrase mode. Phrase mode will always find a result if the input is one or more Chinese characters because it will break the string of characters down into individual characters. At least the individual characters will have entries. See the description in the section Breaking Chinese phrases into words for more details on phrase mode.

If the individual characters do not entries or if you have a word that you feel should be in the dictionary please let me know by sending an email to alex@chinesenotes.com.

Breaking Chinese phrases into words

The chinesenotes.com dictionary can help you look up individual words or all the words in a phrase.  Because Chinese words do not have spaces between them in sentences it can help to look up all the words in a phrase.  Especially if you are a beginner or trying to make the jump from study to using Chinese in real life it can often be hard to figure out the boundaries between the words.  This is where the 'phrase' option in the dictionary is used.

To look up all the words in a phrase (1) select the 'phrase' radio button.  The text input field will change to a larger text area.  Then (2) cut-and-paste Chinese text into the text area.  Click the Search button to process the text.  The results (3) will show the different words in the phrase.  The Hanyu Pinyin (4) will be shown below that.  Finally, the Chinese text will be shown again but in a form that allows you to put your mouse over the characters with information displayed in a mouse-over bubble (5).  This is shown in the figure below.

In the example shown in the screenshot the classical Chinese text 佛告閻羅天子 and this is broken down by the dictionary into three words: 佛 (the Buddha), 告 (told), 閻羅天子 (Yama).

Best of breed Chinese-English dictionary

There are number of innovations that make http://chinesenotes.com a best of breed dictionary.  The first thing is the usability.  When I first started learning Chinese I found the dictionaries nearly unusable because my level was too basic to make sense of the entries.  I always kept referring back to vocabulary lists in my textbooks rather than look in the dictionary.  So, I made a special effort at http://chinesenotes.com to give sufficient information for a beginner to use the dictionary.  One of the features to help beginners and other levels as well are the notes on the use of the word, in addition to the English translation of the word.  Hence the 'notes' in http://chinesenotes.com.