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.

Improvements to chinesenotes.com

I have not written much in the blog for chinesenotes.com but I have done a lot on the site recently.  The vocabulary has increased to over 30,000 words.  As far as I know, it is the only free Chinese-English dictionary with grammar, differentiation of the individual means of terms separated out, and that can split the characters in a phrase into words.  There are also considerable notes on grammar, usage, and synonyms.