...English-Chinese dictionary? I want to help a Chinese-speaking friend learn English, but I have never seen a Chinese-English dictionary in which he could look up a word in Chinese and thus find the English translation for it. I Assume such a dictionary exists, and I know the reverse exists, where he can look up an English word and find what the equivalent Chinese word is. I would guess that what I am looking for requires the user to start with the Chinese word written in Pinyin, using western (Roman) alphabetic characters, and the Chinese words would be ordered, and thus searched for, alphabetically. But if my Chinese friend is not familiar with Pinyin, how would he find his Chinese word in the dictionary to begin with? Is there a dictionary that allows the user to start by finding his Chinese word without using Pinyin?
A related question is: Do Chinese people even need dictionaries in their own language, as English speaking people do in English? Given that the Chinese written language is symbolic rather than phonetic, perhaps there would not be a need for such a dictionary, since it would not be possible to "know" a word without knowing its meaning in Chinese, unlike in English where it is possible to be presented with a word that you could pronounce but still not know the meaning of. Yet I understand that there are many characters in Chinese that the average literate Chinese person may not know, so would therefore have need to "look up" the meaning of. How would he or she go about this? Is there such a thing as a Chinese dictionary for use by Chinese speakers needing to look up a Chinese word (character) with which they are not familiar? They could find the previously unfamiliar Chinese word written as a Chinese character, followed by the word's definition in Chinese, without having to first translate the word into Pinyin just to look it up? If this exists, how does one find the word one needs to look up in Chinese? How are symbolic Chinese (non-phonetic) words (characters) ordered or found (searched for) in Chinese dictionaries and/or encyclopedias if they cannot be ordered alphabetically?
A related question is: Do Chinese people even need dictionaries in their own language, as English speaking people do in English? Given that the Chinese written language is symbolic rather than phonetic, perhaps there would not be a need for such a dictionary, since it would not be possible to "know" a word without knowing its meaning in Chinese, unlike in English where it is possible to be presented with a word that you could pronounce but still not know the meaning of. Yet I understand that there are many characters in Chinese that the average literate Chinese person may not know, so would therefore have need to "look up" the meaning of. How would he or she go about this? Is there such a thing as a Chinese dictionary for use by Chinese speakers needing to look up a Chinese word (character) with which they are not familiar? They could find the previously unfamiliar Chinese word written as a Chinese character, followed by the word's definition in Chinese, without having to first translate the word into Pinyin just to look it up? If this exists, how does one find the word one needs to look up in Chinese? How are symbolic Chinese (non-phonetic) words (characters) ordered or found (searched for) in Chinese dictionaries and/or encyclopedias if they cannot be ordered alphabetically?