Dictionaries, Reference and Audio Courses

Q: Do I have to buy anything for dictionaries and audio?

No. This site covers the same ground for free — Free Chinese-English dictionary, 4,995 word pages, Free word-by-word translator with pinyin, Paste any text and hear it read, free — and those pages need no account and cost nothing. The items on this page are for the things a website cannot be.

Q: Are these ranked by what they pay you?

No, and they structurally cannot be: the data record behind a recommendation on this site has no field for a commission, a rate or a partner, so the ordering cannot follow the money. Every item is ordered by who the reader is.

Q: Why is there no price shown?

Because we have no licensed way to keep a price current, and a stale price on a page like this is worse than none. Cost is shown as a band instead — budget, mid-range or premium.

Paper references worth the shelf space, and the audio courses that teach the mouth rather than the eye.

Free on this site, right now

Be sceptical of this category, including of us. There is a free dictionary on this site with a page for every HSK word, a translator that glosses a sentence word by word with pinyin, and a text reader that will speak any passage you paste into it — and for looking a word up, a searchable digital dictionary beats paper every time. Nobody should buy a Chinese-English dictionary in 2026 in order to look words up.

What paper still does better is the thing you cannot search for: browsing. A frequency dictionary tells you which 500 words to learn next, which no lookup tool can answer because you do not know what to ask it. A good learner's dictionary shows you the five words built on one character together on a page, which is how you notice the pattern. Buy reference for reading around a subject, not for lookups.

Every item below says what it does not do. Nothing is ordered by what it pays — see how this page is written.

Show:

Showing every level in this category.

Intermediate Premium

A Frequency Dictionary of Mandarin Chinese

Routledge

The 5,000 commonest words in Mandarin, in order of how often they actually occur in a large corpus, each with a real example sentence. This answers the question no lookup tool can: what should I learn next. It also settles arguments — when you suspect a word you keep meeting is more important than its HSK level suggests, this is where you check. The thematic lists at the back are the most useful part and almost nobody mentions them.

What it does not do: It is a linguistics reference, not a study book: no exercises, no progression, no audio. It is also the most expensive item in this category and the corpus behind it is not recent, so internet-era vocabulary is under-represented.

Free here first: Our own character and word frequency data, free

Look it up on amazon.ca

Elementary Mid-range

Tuttle Learner's Chinese-English Dictionary

Tuttle

A learner's dictionary does something a comprehensive one deliberately does not: it leaves things out. Entries here are limited to the senses a learner will actually meet, written in plain English, with the measure word and a usage note attached — so you get an answer you can use rather than eleven senses you now have to choose between. It is organised by pinyin, so you can use it from the spoken word without knowing the character.

What it does not do: Its coverage stops well short of what an advanced reader needs, and looking up a character you have only seen written is slow without radical-index practice. Our free dictionary does the lookups faster.

Free here first: Free dictionary, every HSK word

Look it up on amazon.ca

Advanced Premium

Oxford Chinese Dictionary

Oxford University Press

The serious bidirectional desk dictionary, around 300,000 entries, and the one to own if you translate or write Chinese rather than only read it. Its real strength is the English-to-Chinese half, which is where cheap dictionaries fall apart: it distinguishes the registers and collocations behind a single English word instead of handing you a list of characters and wishing you luck. Genuinely useful at HSK 5 and beyond.

What it does not do: It is a heavy, expensive object that will sit on a shelf if your Chinese is below HSK 4 — at that level a learner's dictionary is more useful and a quarter of the price. No audio, obviously, so it cannot help with tones you have not met.

Free here first: Free English-to-Chinese translator

Look it up on amazon.ca

Beginner Premium

Pimsleur Mandarin Chinese audio course

Pimsleur

Thirty-minute audio lessons, entirely spoken, built around recalling a phrase just before you would have forgotten it. It teaches the mouth rather than the eye, which is the half most self-learners neglect until they try to speak and discover they cannot. It is the best thing on this page for a commute, and it is the only item here that genuinely works with your eyes elsewhere.

What it does not do: It teaches no characters at all and its vocabulary is small and business-traveller shaped. It is expensive for what it covers, and the pace is deliberately slow — if you already know 200 words you will find the first lessons painful.

Free here first: Free sentence shadowing with pitch feedback

Look it up on amazon.ca

Expert Premium

ABC Chinese-English Comprehensive Dictionary

John DeFrancis · University of Hawai'i Press

Ordered strictly alphabetically by pinyin, ignoring character boundaries entirely, which sounds like a footnote and changes everything: you can look up any word you have heard without knowing a single character of it, at the speed of an English dictionary. For an advanced learner working from speech, audio or a half-remembered phrase, it is faster than any radical-based reference and it covers classical and literary senses the learner dictionaries omit.

What it does not do: Useless for looking up a character you have seen but cannot pronounce, which is the commonest reason to open a dictionary at all. Very large, expensive, and overkill below HSK 6.

Free here first: Draw a character you can't pronounce, free

Look it up on amazon.ca