"We don't want to make it florid, we want it to be modern and conversational many of the words in the present dictionary are no longer in use," said Kleeman. "The need for studying Chinese by foreigners today is totally different from decades ago Precise, native and practical - that is our core advantage," she said.
She added the dictionary also has a sidebar section that explains words that pack in too much cultural information, like "hutong", a traditional architecture style common in the narrow lanes of Beijing. Another would be "youtiao" the popular Chinese breakfast staple usually eaten with soybean milk.
According to the Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press' press release, terms included in the new version of dictionary were selected from both the Oxford English Corpus and the, City University of Hong's LIVAC Synchronous Corpus.
Kleeman said newer publications updates will be available only for the online version as language often changes too quickly for book versions to keep pace. The online version will also offer a Chinese phonetic pronunciation guide.
The online version, allowing access via different platforms from the PC to the iPad, will be ready "as soon as possible", Kleeman said.
(Source: China Daily)
