Modern Chinese Compound Word Usage Dictionary - For Foreigners Learning Chinese

Author: Yang Qinghui, Editor-in-Chief
Publisher:
Publish Date: 1995-04-01
Features: The title of this dictionary is "A Dictionary of Usage of Modern Chinese 'Separable Words'." The term "separable words" is not coined by the authors but is borrowed. Is there any room for debate about this term? Yes. Then why adopt it? There are three reasons: (1) It is already familiar to many people. When people hear "separable words," they immediately know it refers to combinations like "taking a bath" or "going to war"; (2) It vividly represents the characteristics of such combinations: their two constituent parts are often used together, while they can also be separated, inserted with other elements, or rearranged; (3) This dictionary aims to explain the usage of these combinations, and other issues are not as important for this dictionary. To help readers distinguish between separable words and ordinary compound words, we have compiled a list of the 4,066 separable words we could collect into "A Detailed List of Modern Chinese 'Separable Words'" and appended it to the main text for reference. Due to space constraints, only 1,738 of the most commonly used separable words are selected for analysis in the main text, with a detailed explanation of their separable and inseparable states. In addition to positive explanations, we provide some incorrect examples of improper usage for correction, deepening readers' understanding of certain separable word usages. We can say that this dictionary describes the basic states of "separation" and "combination" of these separable words, but we dare not claim to cover every single case. Strictly speaking, this dictionary remains largely illustrative in its description of the separable and inseparable states of each separable word and in the correction of incorrect examples.