Pinyin vs. Radical-Based Chinese Dictionaries

There are basically two types of Chinese-English dictionaries out there. One is the traditional arrangement, by radicals. The other is by romanized transliteration, nowadays pretty much always using the pinyin system of transliteration. I have both kinds of dictionary. And a few thoughts to share.

Being a native English speaker, I grew up regarding language in primarily its spoken form, with the Latin script roughly (sometimes VERY roughly) reflecting pronunciation. Chinese is written using characters, each of which usually has a unique pronunciation (unlike with Japanese) and represents a concept or "idea" of sorts. Chinese makes tremendous use of compounding, usually with two characters combined, much in the same way that English forms "barnyard" or "sunshine". When I read Chinese and come across an unfamiliar character (quite a common occurrence), I don't know how it is pronounced, just from looking at it. Thus my dictionary arranged by pinyin order is useless, and I am left resorting to the radical-arranged dictionary. A radical is a character unto itself which comprises a part of other characters, albeit often in a distorted form. Which can make it a bit difficult at times looking up characters by radical. Within each radical category in the dictionary, characters are arranged in the order of number of strokes.

Also, the Internet Chinese keyboards I have seen so far rely on radicals. So with any character that I do know, I have to first know its radical and then browse down the list under that radical's heading to the character in order to type it. Pretty damned tedious! I would rather first browse through the character-in-question's pinyin spelling and then click on it. If there are any pinyin-based virtual keyboards like this, I haven't found them yet.

And of course, if I am just listening to someone speak Chinese and I want to look up a word in the dictionary, the pinyin dictionary is the must and the radical dictionary is useless.

What a bother!

Oh, on top of that, did I mention that Chinese is basically written with two different competing writing systems: the traditional and the simplified? No, I didn't.

Double bother!