Dictionary Help
Contents
- Introduction
- Basic Use
- Breaking Chinese phrases into words
- Similar phrases
- Abbreviations
- Basic Word Detail
- Searching on English words
- Understanding basic search results
- Disambiguating different senses of a Chinese word
- Translation Memory Search
- Digital Library and Text Reader
- Quotations in Texts
- Chrome Extension
Introduction
There are number of innovations that make chinesenotes.com more useful than a printed dictionary, including looking up multipe words at once, looking up words in reverse based on an English search term, breaking Chinese text up into words, and finding similar phrases. They are explained here.
Basic Use
For basic use of the dictionary type in or cut and paste in the Chinese or English for the word that you are looking for and click the Search button. You can enter either simplified or traditional Chinese to search on. If you don't get what you are looking for or don't understand the results then keep reading or look at the list of Help topics above. A typical result is shown below for the text 不過，比起一般的車夫來 (From Luotuo Xiangzi by Lao She):
Each term in the list has a link to a page with more details.
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.
Similar phrases
The website can also help to find similar words and phrases, if the term that you are searching for is not in the dictionary. The screenshot below shows the results for looking up the phrase 非一=善之功. This is not in the dictionary but the close match 非一日之功 'cannot be done in one day' is found and displayed.
