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This work concentrates on the major languages of the most commonly practiced martial arts (Cantonese, Japanese, Korean, Mandarin, and Okinawan). This is by no means to say that other dialects or national languages have not added relevant vocabulary, but simply that in the interest of brevity and accuracy, we chose to concentrate on those languages that were the basis of our own studies of the martial arts.

We would like to thank Antonio Flores, Alexander Kask, Scott Shaw, and Meik Skoss for their assistance with the proofing and editing of this text. We would also like to acknowledge the following people without whom this book could not have been completed: Naz Bhayani, Carmen Choy, Rick Dove, Martin Drastil, Robert Gough, Robert Kacpura, Vicki Koh, Rodney Lee, Vincent Liew, Ali Novin, Catherine Walters, and Annette Yang.

Pronunciation Guide to Chinese

In this dictionary, we will be presenting entries from China's two major dialects, Mandarin and Cantonese. In both cases we have tried to make the entries as easy to pronounce as possible while still attempting to use standardized systems of romanization. The fact that Chinese is a tonal monosyllabic language with many sounds that are not used in English presents challenges to attempts at writing it using the roman alphabet. Though there are several different systems available, each of which has its own distinct merits, we have chosen to use the pinyin system for Mandarin entries as it is the standard in the People's Republic of China and the Yale system for Cantonese entries as it is the one most commonly used for that dialect. As the existing literature on the Chinese martial arts is filled with spellings from many of the other systems, we have included them and cross-referenced them to the standardized spellings.