How to use a Chinese dictionary

In the begin, you need to buy a Chinese dictionary xin hua zi dian 新华字典

Buy Chinese dictionary  on Amazon :   https://www.amazon.com/s?k=Chinese+dictionary&crid=3NFFCUFEYX54Y&sprefix=chinese+dictionary%2Caps%2C937&ref=nb_sb_noss_1

Buy Chinese dictionary  on Taobao  https://www.taobao.com

Buy Chinese dictionary  on  Dangdang   http://www.dangdang.com/

Copy the link to brower open, search “新华字典”

1 By alphabetical order

The easiest way to find a character in a dictionary is the Western one: by alphabetical order. Of course, you will need to know thepinyin (or Wade-Giles, depending on the dictionary) transcription for your character, and possibly its tone – take a look at how many characters are there under the syllable ji or shi. In most dictionaries characters are ordered by alphabet and by tone, but not all of them… the notorious Mathew’s Chinese-English Dictionary is by alphabet (though a weird alphabet, with, for instance, sung coming before sha), but not by tone.
In the end, the more characters you know, the faster you will find them on a dictionary, also because experience will help you “guess” the pronunciation of characters you’ve never seen by the elements that compose them – even though this is not a precise method, on the contrary! A couple of examples:

2 By radical

What you must learn is to find characters by radical (what have we learned them for?). First you need to identify the radical in a character, which is most times easy. Let’s try to find a character with a radical we didn’t learn in the tutorial:

Don’t worry; it’s easier than it seems. A little practise and you will immediately understand where the radical is. There are, however, a few difficult radicals; you better learn some characters once for all, because finding them could be really hard. They’re usually very common and composed of few strokes. A couple of examples:

3 By number of strokes

This is a very useful method in case you can’t find the radical of a character, but not every dictionary allow you to use it.

4 The “corners”

The last method is a very difficult one… According to it, the different shapes of strokes are given a number from 0 to 9:

There are 4 ways teach you how to use chinese dictionary.