Big Red: Best Paper Dictionary (for Your Desk)

If you've already got Chubby and Lenny, but you need more words, then this dictionary is for you. I call him "Big Red" to distinguish him from the smaller, thinner version ("Little Red"). You wouldn't want to try to carry him around, but this guy is a must-have for any learner of Chinese who wants to go beyond "nǐ hǎo".

Big Red's strengths:

• Much larger vocabulary (than Chubby and Lenny).
• Pinyin for all the main entries (this is obviously a must-have).
• Available for purchase in most big bookstores in China.

Big Red's weaknesses:

• There is no pinyin for the sentence examples, only hanzi and English. This renders the sentence examples useless to a learner of Chinese who doesn't know 3000 hanzi characters yet.
• Big and heavy (600+ pages).

Details

ISBN: 7100043581Real (boring) title: Concise English - Chinese Chinese - English Dictionary (Third Edition) Go see Big Red at Amazon.com

For my review of an online dictionary click here