First 100 words

I bought this book from a used-book store recently so I could learn some very basic Chinese vocabulary. And just to make it more interesting, I used the vocabulary within to create a 4-way English-Chinese-Japanese-Korean dictionary in Word format. Here's an example (click on the picture below for a slightly better magnification):

In the first column is English, followed by the simplified characters that Mainland China uses. A pronunciation guide is provided, though you can't see it very well in this example. The traditional characters are after that; there's no pronunciation guide because it's the same as the simplified. Japanese is in the fourth column, with furigana, and Korean is in the fifth.

I realize that the lack of a romanized pronunciation guide make the Japanese and Korean columns just about useless to anyone who's not a student of those languages, and I'm sorry about that. Still, I think it's best used for seeing the similarities and the differences among the three East Asian languages.

I thought it was interesting to see how Korean has maintained a lot of its native words for the most basic things. Japanese has done that, too, but its use of kanji masks the prevalence of its original, native vocabulary. If you want to check it out, here's the complete dictionary, in Word format.