A Thematic Dictionary of Contemporary Chinese is a unique resource for intermediate to advanced students of Chinese. The dictionary presents 9,000 words organized thematically in 300 different subject areas. These themes cover the vocabulary necessary for daily use and for conducting meaningful conversations with native Chinese speakers on a variety of topics, from politics to business, and from hobbies to education. Each vocabulary item is annotated with the most frequent collocations allowing learners to improve their fluency by storing new vocabulary in larger linguistic units. Cultural and linguistic tips enable learners to grasp the vocabulary more effectively and increase their awareness of Chinese culture embedded in the language. Review exercises are provided throughout to ensure learners have ample opportunity to practice the new material. This is a great resource for both independent study and classroom use and will be of interest to students and teachers of Chinese alike. For further understanding of Chinese expressions, students are encouraged to read 500 Common Chinese Proverbs and Colloquial Expressions and 500 Common Chinese Idioms.

A Cultural Dictionary of the Chinese Language introduces the 500 most important cultural traits of the Chinese as reflected in language use, especially in Chinese idioms (chengyu), proverbs and colloquial expressions (suyu). Communicative competence, the ultimate goal of language learning, consists of not only linguistic, but intercultural competence, which enables the language learner to speak with fluency and understanding. The Chinese language is richly imbued with cultural wisdoms and values underlying the appropriateness of idioms in the Chinese language. The Dictionary provides Intermediate and B1-C1 level learners as well as scholars of the Chinese language with an essential reference book as well as a useful cultural reader.

This book is concerned with bilingual thematic dictionaries (BTDs). The three chief aims of the research project are: 1) to identify the characteristic features of the bilingual thematic dictionary, 2) to gauge its usefulness, and 3) to make suggestions as to how it could be improved. Various approaches are adopted in order to reveal the nature of the BTD. The typological approach considers the lexicographic genres (bilingual, thematic, and pedagogical) which have been combined to create this hybrid reference work. Particular attention is paid to the BTD's immediate forerunner and closest lexicographic relative: the monolingual thematic learner's dictionary. Detailed textual analyses of contemporary thematic dictionaries identify the characteristic features of the macrostructure, microstructure, and other components from a structural perspective. In order to evaluate the usefulness of the BTD features identified, the textual analyses are supplemented by three pieces of user research involving a questionnaire (to elicit learners' opinions), a test (on the effectiveness of the access structure), and an experiment (to discover how a learner uses a BTD).

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-workshop proceedings of the 20th Chinese Lexical Semantics Workshop, CLSW 2019, held in Chiayi, Taiwan, in June 2019. The 39 full papers and 46 short papers included in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 254 submissions. They are organized in the following topical sections: lexical semantics; applications of natural language processing; lexical resources; corpus linguistics.

As the first volume of a two-volume set that examines the interaction between social transformation and visual culture in contemporary China, this book explores the visual construction of popular culture, avant-garde art, and grassroots media culture. Drawing on an approach of Marxist historic materialism and academic resources of sociology, communication, and art, this study of contemporary China’s visual culture emphasizes two inter-related aspects – the visual construction of society and the social construction of the visual. It seeks to unravel how visual culture is produced and constructed, as well as how it reflects the profound social transformation and reshapes people’s understanding and experience of modernization. In this volume, the contributors revisit popular culture, avant-garde art, and grassroots media culture in contemporary China, analyzing the visual image and representation, and visual culture’s role in social construction. In doing so, the book also reveals the cultural tension of contemporary China, in which the visual aspect figures prominently. This book will serve as an essential read for scholars and students of China studies and cultural studies, as well as all levels of readers interested in visual culture in contemporary China.

Covering modern China, not just Chinese culture from an historical perspective, this important new book fills a sizeable gap in the literature.

This biographical dictionary is an indispensable research tool for information about the prominent persons of the past seven decades in China. The book documents nearly 600 Chinese individuals who contributed, for better or worse, to the development of Chinese life and culture since the founding of the People's Republic of China in 1949. Though the book is weighted toward political figures, it includes persons in business, the military, academia, medicine, social movements, the arts, entertainment and athletics. In addition to an objective description of the person's life, an analysis is provided that identifies the individual's contributions and importance.