Year: at the second session of the fifth CPPCC National Committee held in 1979

Proposal No: 0529

Proposers: Zeng Shiying and four other CPPCC National Committee members

The Chinese character dictionary currently available to primary school students is the Xinhua Dictionary, which is alphabetically arranged by pinyin. There are two versions of the dictionary, one with an index of radicals and the other with a Four-Corner System index. We suggest the entries of the dictionary be arranged directly according to the Four-Corner System, which means that we can delete the Four-Corner System index to save students time. And since some of the entries in the Xinhua Dictionary are rarely used, we might consider reducing the total number of entries to between 5,000 and 6,000. We also suggest that primary school teachers give instructions on how to use a Chinese character dictionary in the classroom.