Chinese dictionaries are ordered by stroke count. To use one you
count the strokes in the character (and hope you are right), then
look through many pages of symbols looking for a match. Pictographic
don't even have a stroke count. My Chinese speaking friends often find
it easier to make a guess at the meaning of a character, using the
character's pictographic aspects, then look the word up in a English-Chinese
dictionary to see if they are right.
[Alain] There are many methods... strokecount, radical-strokecount, 4-corner method, pinyin (or kana - phonetic) method... There is even a Québecer from my city who invented a method based on the one used by art historians to retrieve paintings in worldwide catalogs -- apparently faster than any existing method for Chinese -- I don't know the details but he said that it was limited to about 10 000 characters -- beyond it becomes problematic... Again, I don't know the details. I lost the reference (it was on TV -- but I had by chance talked with him on the phone when he was preapring his book -- I aslo lost his phone number and his name, shame on me!), otherwise I would immediately have bought his book (probably a dictionary).
I wrote many years ago about the traditional methods for Chinese (just to attract interest in potential attendees at a conference I gave in Danmark), if you read French (pictures also help if you can't read it - unfortunately on the web they lost even more their resolution -- it is a scanning of a reproduction that remained in our archives):
http://www.tresor.gouv.qc.ca/doc/chinoi.htm
Alain LaBonté, novice sinophile
Québec
