Customer Reviews

Chinese Characters: Learn & Remember 2,178 Characters and Their Meanings

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Chinese Characters - Learn and Remember 2,178 Characters and Their Meanings lives up to its pledge to put the "ease" into learning Chinese.

This well-organized book presents over 2,000 of the most common characters in a logical and easy to follow sequence based on each character's visual complexity.
Progressing from the simplest character to the most complex - each is accompanied by a short and memorable phrase or story (and clever puns) to help the student understand and move on to the next character.
The phrases are relevant, witty and make the learning process efficient, effective and most of all, enjoyable.

Be sure to visit their website - [...] - which is full of useful study aids including downloadable flash cards and reading practice drills.

The Good:
It arranges characters so as similar characters are bundled together.
Reference available to go back to of previous characters related to the one character you are studying.

The Bad:
The actual Chinese word for the character is practically hidden and in small font.
Many of the small story lines provided to remember the characters are not related at all to Chinese culture.

Some characters are well illustrated and have a simple story.
Other characters, depend on a story for recollection; but the story makes no sense.
The book is a good reference; but, I would not recommend it.

I began Japanese before Chinese. I know enough Japanese to clumsily express myself - my Kanji knowledge is in the 750-800 territory. I bought this cause I'd like to try Chinese as well.

WHY I DON'T LIKE THIS BOOK

Reason 1: thoughtless presentation of the information

Imagine you wanted to learn English as a second language. Since there's so many words in our language, which would you want to learn first?

"Fast" and "slow", or "irreverent" and "disengaged"?
"Blue" and "red", or "imposition" and "carburetor"?

When I began Japanese, the resources I used began with simple, common, and highly practical words. I learned the colors, I learned adjectives (fast, slow, small, big, safe, dangerous) I learned useful verbs (walk, run, look, see, climb). These facilitated me moving onto more advanced, obscure words later.

This book does not arrange the characters by how useful they'll actually be to a learner, it arranges them by how the strokes look, which has little bearing on the day to day utilization. It doesn't reinforce the lessons with practical reading passages showing native speakers harnessing this vocabulary, it just gives goofy stories to help people with bad memorization skills cram the shapes into their head.

Like, if I wanted to give a ESL learner a lesson to reinforce those words above, I'd make a pretend dialog like "Is your car fast, or slow?" To which person B would answer, "Well, it's slow, but it's big and safe."

This book, instead, says, "Here, memorize the words 'repel', 'jade tablet', 'hang', and 'scholar'. Good luck!"

Reason 2: no stroke count index

Suppose you wanted to look up the character ', but you don't have a computer. The way to do this is determine how many strokes it takes to write the character (12), then find a big list of characters with 12 strokes in them.

This book doesn't have that. So when I encounter a character I don't know, or am just curious about, I have no way of specifically locating it inside this book. The only way I could do it would be to painstakingly hunt through the whole book. I kind of resent that, since my Japanese kanji dictionary (2000 essential kanji) managed to include this.

VERDICT:

Use the $20 price tag to pay for a month's worth of broadband Internet and download the raw dictionary information off a website somewhere. I'm not really pleased with this book.

This book is based on the standard-changing, break-through concept. I think that most foreign students of the language would love to know about the composite structure of Chinese characters. Breaking the complex pictorial symbols into meaningful smaller components makes the learning both easier and more enjoyable. However, it is difficult to find such information, except for well-known small set of sample characters, as many Chinese teachers are not familiar with the symbolism of the character particles. It is possible to do a research for the specific characters we are interested in, which is very rewarding, but requires a lot of time.

The author did an exemplary work by explaining the composition of over 2,000 characters. I found majority of explanations very useful and this is one of my favorite books for Chinese language study. However, a lot of stories are relatively arbitrary, with the strained correlation between components. So I would really love to have the edition of this book that has more authoritative and substantial information, based on character history and symbology. Still, I would certainly recommend the present work as the pioneering and very useful contribution to the topic.

I actually like the mnemonics style of teaching except that there are two problems:
First, the English words the author used to explain the characters can sometime be quite esoteric that I often have to look up an English dictionary (by dictionary, I actually mean to Google it up).
Second, since Chinese words would normally consist of two or three characters, it would be great if the author shows some examples of words where the character is used, for example, the character for xing1 is often combined with qi1 to form the word xing1qi1 which means week, etc.

This book will be useful for customers who want to be able to see a Chinese character and translate that character into English. For those who want to understand and create Chinese language, this book will be much less useful because the stories lead to English rather than to Chinese sounds. The pinyin sounds and tones are included in the entries but are not made memorable by the entries. Furthermore, as with most learning tools like this, there is not enough recognition that few Chinese characters operate in isolation. Most Chinese meanings are created by combinations of characters.

Not for basic beginners looking to improve conversation or fluency; but when you're stuck at the intermediate level, having trouble remembering the thousands of characters, this complete system is the best I've found for quickly getting the figures to stick in your memory. Can be a very useful study aide.

My college-age daughter and I have used the accompanying website to Dr. Hoenig's book for some time and found it very useful in learning Chinese. The book is a valuable complement to the website, and the combination is essential to anyone seriously interested in learning Chinese.

Quiero dar las gracias a Sergio R. G. Horta, quien contestó a mi revisión así: "Maybe you are reviewing another edition of the book. Because this one does have the pinyin for every character on the right side of page.". Tiene toda la razón. Mi reporte fue negativo, especialmente porque no encontraba el pinyin en cada carácter. Estoy acostumbrado a leerlo inmediatamente después del carácter, antes de su definición, y no al margen de la página. En este caso, mi reporte es que se me hace difícil aprenderlos así, aunque seguramente me venga bien para repasar "tapando" el pinyin. Muchas gracias de nuevo.

I bought this book because Chinese Characters are so amasing, I wanted to learn more. I have a book refering to the chinese characters, describing how they were built, the meaning... but it was only for 300 charaters (book written in the 60'). I needed more.
I found this one, and thought I could find great knowledge.
It's not that it's bad. It good, but the thing is, I don't like the stories the autor wrote about the meaning of the characters. Sometimes, you can say it's the right meaning: ex: the autor describes that this character means "mutual" and explains that we can see stylized arms giving eachother "mutual" assistance. This is amazing, beautiful... ! But other times... the autor made up some ridicule story to describe a character: ex: this character means "behind" . The autor's explanation is: "Here the mouth represents a guy on audition in Hollywood. Oop - he didn't get the part. Don't let the door bang you on the "behind" on your way out" I mean COME ON!!! I sooo do not care about this kind of explanation! And there's tone of it like that! I don't think it's professional. I don't think that the beauty of the Chinese Characters needed stupid explanations like that. This is not what we want by bying this book.
I still give him 4 stars because even when the story is profoundly ridicule, like ºó, we are still learning that it means "behind", and construct from "mouth" and "door", and is "h¨°u" in Chinese...
I just wish we could know where this character really come from.
I wrote the chinese characters... but amazon doesn`t take them... anyway, you understand my point.