Museum of Odd Peanuts Books

Learning English with Peanuts

An inter-language dictionary is a very specialized type of reference book, and it really should be designed from the ground up. The Chinese/English edition of The Charlie Brown Dictionary, however, makes no such attempt. Instead, it takes the English version of The Charlie Brown Dictionary and adds the Chinese translation of each entry, translating the word and the definition.

The rather odd method that The Charlie Brown Dictionary used to define words, however, actually works to this book's benefit. Most of the definitions in the source dictionary aren't definitions as we usually understand them. Instead, the dictionary uses the word in a sentence, and then has another sentence that means the same as the prior sentence, but without that word. So the Chinese reader struggling to read an English work can look up a problematic word in this dictionary, see the equivalent Chinese word, and see it used in context in English.

However, the book stumbles in timeliness. This book is from the 1990s, but the English language Charlie Brown's Dictionary it's based on was created in 1973. Worse yet, the English edition is derived from The Rainbow Dictionary, originally published in 1947. As such, the word "milkman" was important enough to include in a children's dictionary, but not the word "computer". And given the ever-shifting nature of language, the passage of half a century has given some example sentences meanings that were never intended.

A tip to the Japanese: if you really want to learn conversational English, you shouldn't learn it from a cartoon dog, particularly a cartoon dog who doesn't speak. Snoopy's English Conversation School is actually one of a set of seven books, 4 featuring Peanuts characters and three with characters from other strips, designed to educate the Japanese reader. Strips are printed in English, then translated into Japanese, and idiom used in the strip is explained and similar idiom is discussed.

In the back of this particular volume is "Snoopy's English-Sound Dictionary", filled with panels which feature sound effects and onomatopoeia, showing their transliteration into Japanese. There are pages on such topics as screaming, mechanical rhythm, the sound of short breath, and laughing. There's even a spread which shows the sound of falling stars -- it reprints a strip in which Linus watches stars fall silently, then notes to Lucy that they never scream.

School Peanuts 3, from 1971, was published in Denmark but is entirely in English. It's a book for European English students, to teach the more of the language and some American culture, using Peanuts strips as an example. The authorial voice of the text is supposed to be an American writing, but when he explains the "church festival" Halloween, he claims that when he was very small he believed in the Great Pumpkin just like Linus does. This more than anything shows the weakness in learning about American culture from Peanuts strips.