What is this Dictionary?

The dictionary is actually three main Chinese-English dictionaries. The first lists single characters while the second and third list words of two or more characters.

The first dictionary is a list of single characters with their English definitions, English spelling and typing codes. Because mainland China in the main uses simplified characters while in Taiwan and in Chinese communities outside of China traditional characters are use I’ve included both so that you can see how they differ. You’ll notice that not all characters are simplified, just some of them and in some cases they look radically different in other cases the changes are minor.
The English spelling is so that foreigners like myself, and perhaps yourself (if you are of non-chinese origin) can “say” the characters. There are a number of “romanization” systems. In the first dictionary I use two, Pinyin which is the most “officially” recognized, and G.R. whose spelling most closely approximates the sound of each word. I’ve included both so that you can use the G.R. spelling to help you properly pronounce the Pinyin spelling and so that you can see the G.R. system in action. Because it doesn’t use accent marks for tone it can take longer to learn but the advantages are that those who do learn it generally have better pronounciation because the G.R. system is designed with the foreign tongue in mind. Rather than having to think about the different tones, the spelling gives the tone “naturally.”
The cangjie codes are for touch typing in Chinese. If you have a mac then Cangjie is built into the operating system and you can learn it on from the Settings dialog. Windows also has this feature.
I’ve listed both the letter codes and the equivalent symbol codes. You can actually test your skill in typing whether or not you have cangjie by typing the # sign followed by a cangjie code after the html address to see the relevant entry come up. This is also a way of navigating around the dictionary.
Why learn cangjie as opposed to other methods? Cangjie is a touch typing method. There are no pull down menus. Also you don’t have to know the sound of the word, you can look at the character, or know the character to determine the code. It is also a good way of remembering characters so that you can actually write them because it forces you to recognize the components of the character... not quite perfectly but it does help.

The second dictionary is a list of character words. It is special because the character doesn’t have to be the first character in the word. It gives you a chance to see a character in words where it isn’t just the first character. (e.g.) It is limited to words two or three characters long.
The third dictionary is also a word dictionary but this one is organized only by the first character in each word. It has words of 2, 3 or more characters long so you can see characters used in longer words.