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BOOK REVIEWS
sheer volume alone makes this dictionary unique and should tell the prospective user that he will likely find here many definitions which do not appear elsewhere or which would be found only after a time-consuming search of numerous other sources.
The arrangement is alphabetical in romanized Cantonese. With only minor modifications the romanization is the same as that used in Meyer and Wempe, The Student's Cantonese-English Dictionary, and in a number of textbooks on colloquial Cantonese ranging from Father O'Melia's First Year Cantonese to S. L. Wong's Cantonese Conversation Grammar (which latter text duplicates all the romanized material in the Barnett-Chao system as well). This makes a handy tie-in with training materials for the beginning student although there are some concomitant problems which I will mention below. Being in romanized form this book should be especially welcome to those who want to study the dialect without necessarily learning characters in the process. For those who need them, characters are available in the back of the book, and it is even possible to work from material in characters through the keys in the appendices which are cross-referenced to the romanized entries and definitions. However, according to the title the chief target is not the reader but the speaker, the person who hears an expression and wants to look it up in the quickest and most convenient way. In this form the dictionary fills a long need for a large reference work on the dialect in romanized form.
The title is, however, somewhat misleading since the book is obviously and admittedly designed for the reader as well as the speaker. This is seen principally in the fact that there was no attempt to stick exclusively to colloquial or conversational material. A great number of words and phrases from the classical and written language are included and many of these cannot be described as allusions or quotations commonly heard in the spoken language.
As might be expected from a book this size with such a large number of entries, each entry receives only a minimum of attention and the simplest possible definition usually suffices. There is little or nothing in the way of elaboration on the meanings and no examples of usage. This may occasionally leave the user with an additional research job and it certainly won't afford any feel for context in case the student wonders how to put an item back