Written Chinese
Written Chinese () comprises Chinese characters used to represent the Chinese language. Chinese characters do not constitute an alphabet or a compact syllabary. Rather, the writing system is roughly logosyllabic; that is, a character generally represents one syllable of spoken Chinese and may be a word on its own or a part of a polysyllabic word. The characters themselves are often composed of parts that may represent physical objects, abstract notions, or pronunciation. Literacy requires the memorization of a great many characters: educated Chinese know about 4,000. The large number of Chinese characters has in part led to the adoption of Western alphabets as an auxiliary means of representing Chinese.
Concise Dictionary of Spoken Chinese
The "Concise Dictionary of Spoken Chinese" comprises approximately 5,000 single-character head entries, collated by radical-and-stroke and numbered according to the 214 Kangxi radicals. The twelve most frequent radicals are given at the bottom of the pages for the dictionary user to memorize. "To insure further the finding of the characters, the authors have entered each character under all its apparently possible radicals and made a cross reference to the main entry" (1947: xxvi). For instance, 魯 "luu" is entered under radical 72 曰 "sun", with the note "See Rad. 195 魚 ["fish"]." The "Concise Dictionary" includes the popular and cursive forms of many characters, as well as the Suzhou numerals (e.g., "〢 "ell" Soochow numeral for '2', used in trade"), and the Bopomofo symbols ("ㄎ "ke" National Phonetic letter for the aspirated initial "k""), which had never been included in a Chinese dictionary, thus removing "one source of bewilderment for the foreign student of Chinese" (Luo 1947: 434).