20 Happy Belated Chinese Language Day 🇺🇳
Did you know that 4/20 is the official UN Chinese Language Day?
For our twentieth issue, we take a break from our usual puzzling format to jump behind the scenes of our book, and into the world of language nerds!
This is Hanmoji Puzzles, your bi-weekly dose of emoji word puzzles inspired by The Hanmoji Handbook. And don’t worry — you don’t need to speak Chinese at all in order to play along. You just need a love for emoji and be curious about how language works!
There Is More Than One Chinese Language
As we say in The Hanmoji Handbook, “Here’s the thing about spoken Chinese: it refers to many different languages — dozens, in fact — used by people in various parts of China, today and throughout history.” So when we discovered that the United Nations created an official, singular Chinese Language Day (celebrated annually on 4/20 of all days), we were a little perplexed. But here’s an idea for next year: let’s call it Chinese Languages Day instead, and use the event to highlight the plurality of Chinese expression around the world.
To that end, we wanted to share the hard-to-find resources that enabled us to show the breadth of spoken Chinese in our book: the online dictionaries for the regional, non-official languages of China and its diaspora. These spoken languages are increasingly sidelined in the recent standardization and nationalization of Mandarin, as Oiwan Lam notes in Global Voices. Keep in mind, though, that the standardization of written Chinese started millennia earlier than the spoken form, so all of these non-Mandarin languages are still written with either Simplified or Traditional Chinese characters. There are some variations in specific words and phrases chosen for written expression, especially in colloquial, but for the most part, the written script is the same. These dictionaries can help us understand the nuances and variations.
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Cantonese dictionaries
Format: Mobile app
Features: Dictionary, OCR, flashcards, and more!
Definitions: English
Phonetic guides: Mandarin, Cantonese
Audio pronunciation: Mandarin, Cantonese
Price: Free with paid add-ons
Launch date: 2000
Creators: A study abroad student turned software developer turned entrepreneur (see Tech in Asia interview)
Our favorite go-to when it comes to looking up Cantonese words is definitely the Pleco mobile app. Pleco is a tried-and-true powerhouse for your Chinese learning needs. At its core, it’s a Chinese-to-English dictionary, but it also sports features for flashcard memorization and OCR (optical character recognition) document reading. Most importantly, it ships with Cantonese support that can be easily turned on, along with add-ons (both free and paid) that bolster its Cantonese vocabulary. For more details on how to use Pleco for Cantonese, check out Cantoblog’s How to make Pleco into a Cantonese power tool.
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Format: Website
Features: Dictionary, flashcards, quiz
Definitions: English
Phonetic guides: Mandarin, Cantonese
Audio pronunciation: Mandarin, Cantonese
Price: Free
Launch date: 2003
Creators: A software developer at a Dutch university
As a backup, and when we’re only on our computers, the MDBG Chinese Dictionary’s character lookup tool also includes results in Cantonese, though its breadth of entries pales in comparison to Pleco’s add-on dictionaries. The MDBG dictionary is based around a public-use, Creative Commons licensed Chinese-to-English dictionary (first created in 1997), which is why it is a free and powerful resource.
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Teochew/Chaozhou dictionaries
Format: Website
Features: Dictionary, word lists, articles
Definitions: Chinese (with very limited English)
Phonetic guides: Teochew, Mandarin,
Audio pronunciation: Teochew, Mandarin
Price: Free
Launch date: 2005 (website), 2017 (dictionary feature)
Creators: Language enthusiasts across China
潮州·母语 (Chaozhou Mogher) is an online resource with depth and history — its website includes both dictionary functionality as well as word lists, a radicals index and a guide to Teochew tones.
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Format: Website and mobile app
Features: Dictionary
Definitions: Chinese
Phonetic guides: Teochew, Mandarin
Audio pronunciation: Teochew, Mandarin
Price: Free (website) and $2.99 (iOS app)
Launch date: 2013 (website), 2018 (mobile app)
Creators: Married couple in the Chaozhou region (see local TV news clip)
潮州音字典 (czyzd.com) comes in both mobile app and website form. The iOS mobile app is available on the Apple App Store, though the Android version only comes via a download-at-your-own-risk file on their website. Their website on the other hand, is accessible to all, though it unfortunately runs through an unencrypted HTTP connection.
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Taishanese/Toisanese dictionaries
Taishanese Language Home 台山话资源网 ⭐️
Format: Website
Features: Dictionary, word lists, articles
Definitions: English
Phonetic guides: Taishanese, Cantonese, Mandarin
Audio pronunciation: Taishanese
Price: Free
Launch date: 2013
Creators: Engineer and blogger Stephen Li
Taishanese Language Home 台山话资源网 is “a searchable database with audio pronunciation intended for general usage as well as to facilitate linguistics research.” This Chinese-to-English dictionary (with audio clips for pronunciation) is a work-in-progress. Its creator, Stephen Li, also runs a blog called Toisanese Chop Suey 台山话杂碎: A Tribute to My Mother Tongue.
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Wu language group dictionary (includes Shanghainese and Suzhounese)
Format: Website
Features: Dictionary, map
Definitions: N/A
Phonetic guides: Multiple Wu languages
Audio pronunciation: Shanghainese (and sometimes others)
Price: Free
Launch date: 2016
Creators: Language enthusiasts across China (see origin story)
吳語學堂 [Wu Language Academy] is an expansive resource that’s working to capture an entire language group under one roof. It might not have as many features (or audio clips) as some of the other dictionaries, but its breadth of coverage, as shown in the screenshotted map above, is an astounding achievement all on its own.
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Wiktionary, a dictionary for many languages
Format: Website
Features: Dictionary, wiki
Definitions: English
Phonetic guides: Mandarin, Cantonese, Hakka, Jin, Min Bei, Min Dong, Min Nan, Wu…
Audio pronunciation: Mandarin
Price: Free
Launch date: 2002
Creators: Wikimedia Foundation and volunteers
Because of its breadth of coverage, Wiktionary is a great place to start. But because it rarely ever cites its sources for pronunciation data, it’s hard to figure out how verified the information is or what the intent of the volunteer editors/writers is. Having said that, the quality of data on there is still very high in our experience, so we recommend using it in conjunction with at least one other source.
Know of other Chinese language dictionaries that you think we should know about? Please let us know by replying to this email.
🥳 Updates from our parent project, The Hanmoji Handbook
The Queens Public Library included us on their AAPI month booklist.
Our publisher made a Hanmoji Puzzles inspired Tik Tok filter — try it out yourself!
We were featured in the South China Morning Post (one of our hometown papers)!
Our book is now out — order it now on IndieBound 🇺🇸, Shop Local 🇨🇦, Blackwell’s 🌏, Barnes & Noble 🇺🇸, or Indigo 🇨🇦.
Hanmoji Puzzles is a spin off of The Hanmoji Handbook: A Guide to Learning Chinese Through Emoji, which you should absolutely order today 😗. This newsletter is a project by Jason Li, An Xiao Mina and Jennifer 8. Lee.