Find it fast and avoid frustration! That was the key theme in designing this book. Finding characters fast means more productive study. And frustration is an emotion shared by many who have used a Chinese Dictionary.

Finding characters fast? Try searching for the character,   It looks complex but contains two very common characters, 目mù and大dà. Using this basic knowledge and this book to find this character takes about fifteen seconds! The same search in a Chinese dictionary took me over two minutes.

Frustration using Chinese dictionaries can be illustrated by trying to look up the character, 里 (lǐ). To look up a Chinese character in a typical Chinese dictionary you search on the ‘radical’, which is the component of a character that carries the sense or meaning (the other part of the character is usually called the ‘phonetic’ part, which conveys the sound.) Both 田and 土are radicals and里 looks like a combination of these two radicals, but if you look up either of these in a traditional radical index, you will never find里. That is because里 is itself a radical so you look it up under itself! That is frustrating, but say you look up a character that contains 里. There are many that contain里, but if you look for characters which have this radical (里) you may find only six of the thirty-one characters that actually contain里! That is because the other twenty-five characters contain里in the ‘phonetic’ component. Of course there is no way knowing that when you start your search!

My book indexes all parts of the character so that you can be sure to find any character, no matter what, even starting with just one small part of the character. What is more, my book permits you to search for combinations of components, which is something that no other book attempts!

I wanted to make a book that I would like to use and I believe that I have done so. I recall a few minutes after arriving home with a printed draft I was already using this book to search out new characters from a Chinese novel that I was reading. I suddenly felt a great sense of freedom. It was so quick!

I hope that many other readers find the same satisfaction using this book.