"Anyone with an interest in Chinese or Russian lexicography will use this book with pleasure.... [The] English text is succinct, direct, clear, and elegant, and it gives precisely correct English versions of the Russian, which does the same for the Chinese." --Dictionaries

"This admirable production ... will surely have a very long and useful life in the appropriate sections of good university libraries." --Clinical Neurophysiology 111 (2000)

Because Chinese characters are not based on an alphabet, the ordering of characters in a dictionary, particularly in a dictionary intended for use by non-Chinese, has presented a formidable problem. The Rosenberg Graphical System, an effective and efficient system for overcoming this difficulty, has been in use in the former USSR for almost 80 years. John S. Barlow has made this superb system available for the first time to English-speaking students and scholars by adding an English text to an existing Chinese-Russian dictionary in which the characters are ordered according to the Graphical System.

This trilingual dictionary offers several features not included in the Chinese-Russian version: a detailed guide to using the system, a history of its origins, and--for those who prefer to locate a character by its pronunciation--an alphabetical pinyin index. All students of Chinese, from elementary to advanced levels, will appreciate the rapidity with which characters can be located in this dictionary compared with conventionally arranged dictionaries.