NO PINYIN, December 22, 2002
　

I love these books. Really, I do. They have such a WIDE spectrum of topics, areas careers, trades...you name it.
The outline of each book is as follows:
*pictures of various objects/situations (For example, a ilustration of a lab and various things in the lab numbered, like a beaker, burner, microscope, etc.).
*A list next to the ilustration with the forgien word, then the english equivilant underneath.
And thats it! It is SO simple to understand, and it is broken down into (Many MANY) sections that are every-day situations that you usually would not get from a standard college-level textbook.
Only one problem THIS BOOK HAS NO PINYIN FOR THOSE WHO ARE NOT TOO ADVANCED!! I wrote to the editors and they said "We thank you for your suggestion, but as of this time we have no plans to make a new edition. IF AS MANY PEOPLE WHO READ THIS VOICE YOUR OPINION OF HOW IMPORTANT PINYIN IS TO A STUDENT, WE MAY GET THEM TO INCLUDE IT IN THE NEXT EDITION!! Just e-mail them from the oxford site.

Great even without pinyin, May 19, 2002
　

A great noun builder for intermediate to advanced students of Chinese (or Chinese-speaking students of English), this book will help you attain a degree of precision in your vocabulary that would be difficult to achieve any other way without a substantial investment of time. The dictionary is arranged by subject areas varying from the highly technical (e.g. precision instrument parts) to the everyday (e.g. tableware). There is no romanization, however. The simplified character set is used throughout to reflect contemporary mainland usage. About one-fourth of the volume is taken up by the index which is helpful if you want to quickly find the translation of a particular word without having to wade through the many subject areas. The Chinese portion of the index is arranged in the traditional radical-based format. English speakers could have been benefited from the addition of alphabetical pinyin-based entries in the index. Well-suited for browsing (a quality that is rare for a dictionary) and very different from most other language learning resources, this book is indispensable for the serious language student or professional working abroad.

Excellent dictionary for technical/specialized terms, April 18, 2000
　

Great reference for technical translation April 12, 2000 I have Oxford-Duden pictorial dictionaries in both Chinese and Thai, and have found them very helpful reference materials indeed for situations where translation of esoteric or extremely technical items is required, such as working parts of machinery, military hardware, etc. Obviously, being a pictorial dictionary, abstract nouns as well as verbs are not listed. I should also say that this dictionary would more than likely be superfluous for a basic-level speaker. I think it would probably be quicker to look up a word such as "sparrow" in a standard Eng-Chinese dictionary than to track down the same word using this one. However, it is a fantastic technical reference.

a must for anyone who requires advanced knowledge of chinese, March 22, 2000
　

This book is wonderful. If you've ever needed to know the character for auricola, bustle, or pipe scraper, you'll find it here. The illustrations are mainly in black and white, though the section on colors and chroma gets a full-color page. The characters are traditional, small but readable. My only gripe is that there is NO PRONOUNCIATION GUIDE - no pinyin, no wade-giles...nothing but the english word and the characters. This is a bit frustrating if you are not god, and don't know each character by sight. You can, of course, locate the pronounciation in another dictionary by stroke order. But it would be so simple for the editors to include pronounciation in the next edition. Still, I haven't found a better pictorial dictionary.