How to look up Chinese characters in a dictionary

Looking up Chinese characters in a printed dictionary can be an ordeal for the uninitiated. Where do you start when you do not know how to pronounce that character you have never seen before? Just follow the following steps and you will soon know how to do it.

对于缺少经验的人来说，用字典里查汉字简直是个折磨。当你碰到一个以前从未见过的汉字，更不知道如何发音，得从哪里下手呢？看下面的步骤，你很快就能知道如何使用了。

Steps

1  Familiarize yourself with how Chinese is written. Examine the character and identify its radical. For the sake of this example we will pretend we are looking up the character that means home (but we do not know that yet). Count how many strokes the radical has. In this case it has three.

1.      熟悉汉字的写法。看下汉字，认识它的部首。比如，我们要查汉字“家“，但我们不知道这个字怎么念。先数清部首的笔画（3个笔画）。

2  Turn to the radical look-up section of the dictionary, and go to the section with the appropriate number of strokes, namely three. Here you have to skim down the list of radicals until you find the one that is in this character (it looks a little like a roof). There is a number next to it, let's say it is 73.

翻到字典的部首查询页，按笔画数找到相关的页面。浏览部首目录，找到这个部首所在的页面，即，73页.

3  Now turn to section 73 in the index. You will see under this radical many characters listed, grouped by the number of strokes. Count how many strokes in the rest of the character, in this case it has seven. Go to the section with seven strokes and skim through until you recognise the character we are looking up. There is a number next to it which is the page number in the main part of the dictionary. You can now turn there and find the character, where you will at last see its pronunciation ('jia1') and meaning: 'home' or 'house'.

翻到第73页，你会看到同属这个部首的所有汉字。算下笔画数（除部首“宀”外），翻到相应笔画数的页面，快速浏览目录，定位到“家”。翻到相应的页面，你就能查到拼音了。