Additional information
by Adrian Van Amstel (Author)
Do you often have difficulty finding a particular character in a standard Chinese dictionary? Do you often fail to remember characters, though you have seen and looked them up several times? Don't you think one of the reasons could be that characters that look similar to others are not grouped together? And don't you think that the etymological background of characters (their historical development) could and should be explained better in order to understand the reason for all those dots and strokes? If your answer to these questions is 'yes', then help could be on its way within seconds. The Simplified Chinese Character Dictionary contains several new features that make looking up, learning and remembering Chinese characters more effective and more fun:
- characters are arranged by the phonetic part that in most characters is relatively easy to distinguish. By grouping characters that have the same phonetic into series, it is now possible to study and compare characters that look almost similar;
- any character can be found by stripping it first of its radicals and then splitting the remaining phonetic into components. Phonetic and character can then be found under one of these components;
- more than 5,700 simplified character shapes can be found using the same 3-step method. Examples - with pinyin transliterations - are given of their usage in daily or literary Chinese.
- counting strokes is not necessary, and - once the user is used to the look-up method - most characters can be found within seconds;
- etymological explanations are included, which can help people to understand the historical background of phonetics and characters, moreover, they are very effective in helping to remember them and distinguishing them from others that look similar;
- a 30-page introduction is included, in which the method used for looking up characters is explained step by step and with many examples. It also explains how to distinguish radicals, besides explaining different kinds of radicals. Moreover, the introduction contains a brief overview of the historical development of Chinese characters in general.
Author Biography
Adrian van Amstel holds a Masters degree in Physics from the University of Amsterdam and worked for more than twelve years as database analyst and programmer. Since 1991 he has been living in China, and is presently working as an English teacher at the Guangdong University of Finance and Economics in Guangzhou. One of the reasons for going to China was his interest in Chinese culture and language. While studying Chinese in the early 1990s, he found the way Chinese characters are arranged in standard Chinese dictionaries rather confusing, and not help a foreign student of the language with remembering and spotting differences between characters that look similar. When he found T.K. Ann's "Cracking the Chinese Puzzle", he realized that an other arrangement would be possible, and started work on an alternative system, which took about three months to complete. With this handwritten first version of the Chinese Character Dictionary - in fact a notebook - he went to Taiwan in 1994. During his stay on the island he became interested in the period of Dutch colonization of the island in the 17th century. Fascinated by the historical accounts and physical remains in the form of the ruins of the fortress Zeelandia he began to make plans to write an account of this almost forgotten period in the history of the Dutch East India Company. In the year 2000 he decided to take a course in English language teaching to adults (CELTA), in order to be able to support himself and at the same continue to live in China and work on the character dictionary and on the book about the Dutch East India Company and Taiwan. Finally, in 2011 his book about Taiwan was published in Dutch under the title "Barbaren, Rebellen and Mandarijnen" (Barbarians, rebels and mandarins), and in the summer of 2016 the Chinese Character Dictionary and the Simplified Chinese Character Dictionary were published.
