Customer Reviews

The First 100 Chinese Characters: Traditional Character Edition: The Quick and Easy Method to Learn the 100 Most Basic Chinese Characters (Tuttle Language Library)

5 star:		(11)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

I am learning to speak Mandarin but felt I needed more knowledge of the written language to get a more comprehensive feel for the language. I looked around and settled on this one and it was a good choice. It has just enough information for me to learn the character and its meaning as well as some commonly used phrases in which each character appears. It gives ample space to practice the strokes of the character. The characters are also in a type size that makes it easier to read than some other books I've looked at.

This book is most useful for students with no exposure to the Chinese writing system. After a clear and thorough introduction to the history and development of Chinese characters, students are introduced to 100 basic characters - a nice attainable number for the first year of high school instruction or the first semester at the university level. Each entry includes several example compounds (very important for Chinese, in which disparate characters can be combined discretely to form unexpected words) as well as nice, large boxes for practicing. While the Matthews have made a nice introduction to Chinese characters, more serious students of the language will outgrow it quite quickly. Their newer book Tuttle Learning Chinese Characters Volume 1: A Revolutionary New Way to Learn and Remember the 800 Most Basic Chinese Characters provides several hundred more characters (without the practice space) for the more ambitious.

Nathan Dummitt
author of Chinese Through Tone & Color

This book really does have the characters you need to know for a basic understanding of Mandarin. I like the fact that it supplies a proper grid, gives you both stroke order and direction, and shows the radical for each character. If you're new to learning Chinese, I'd also recommend flashcards (or make your own based on this book) because constant repetition is the key here.

This book and the sequel, The Second 100 Chinese Characters, are excellent drill (recognition) and (writing) practice books for learning Chinese characters, their use in some phrases, pronunciation (Pinyin), and of course meanings. Rather than filling up all of the practice squares and running out of space to write in the book, cut out each of the pages and place them in clear page protector sleeves in a 3 ring binder. Then use dry erase pens (red or black work very well) with a suitably small point, along with a separate dry eraser with about a 1 inch diameter (Foray Dry Erase Board Cleaner works nicely)to clear your full page shortly after you finish it. This is important because your writing erases more easily on these sleeves if you don't let it linger after moving to another page. Both books' pages can fit nicely in one binder and you can use it over and over.

In addition to the books, I very highly recommend buying Tuttle's business card-sized flash cards Volumes 1-4, which have the numbered companions to each page of these two books. They contain most of the additional information that appears on the books' pages for each character. I bought several cheap camera/cell phone carrying cases from discount bins that are the right size to hold a stack of cards, and carry one with me to use whenever I am waiting somewhere (like in the dentist's office or when standing in a long line) with a few minutes to kill.

Thanks for this book. It came on time and is helping us to slowly learn to read the confusing language that is Chinese!

This is an excellent book which I am very glad to have. It is just what it looks like and is large enough to actually make it east to practice drawing the characters.

I have absolutely no educational background in Mandarin Chinese, and I love this book. It is reader-friendly and practical. It provides examples of how words are used in English to demonstrate and contrast how words are formed in Chinese. This book never promises anything that it doesn't fulfill. I look forward to purchasing the next book of this series. A+

The good thing about this very well designed book is that it starts just like an educative game and it actually ends up giving you a strong envy to discover or learn another extra 100 characters! Perhaps even to start learning Mandarin in earnest. You will never go to a Chinese restaurant like ever before... as after working out with this book for a while Chinese characters in the menu will make sense to you! Of course just the easiest ones. A real handy language book.

I would really highly recommend Tuttle's Learning Chinese Characters instead of this book. This book covers 100 characters, compared with "Learning Chinese Characters", which teacher 800 characters. "Learning Chinese Characters" also uses quirky stories to help you remember composite characters and drawings to help you remember basic building blocks. This book "First 100 Chinese Characters" has great information about writing the characters, but that information is almost entirely also available in "Learning Chinese Characters", and when you open this book, you'll see that "First 100 Characters" is about 15% information and the rest of every page is just room for you to the practice the characters, which you could obviously do in a separate notebook if you choose to use the information-packed "Learning Chinese Characters"
Tuttle Learning Chinese Characters Volume 1: A Revolutionary New Way to Learn and Remember the 800 Most Basic Chinese Characters

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The First 100 Chinese Characters

by Alison and Laurence Mathews

"The Quick and Easy Method to Learn the 100 Most Basic Chinese Characters"

ISBN 978-0-8048-3830-6

This could have been a good book if the authors knew more about Chinese language.

The effort is incomplete and lacks the essentials to develop good character writing skills.

This book does very little very well. There are absolutely no;

1) no Rules of Hanyu Pinyin
2) no Rules of Grammar
3) no Rules of Pronunciation
4) no list of named Strokes
5) incomplete rules of Stroke Order
6) very poorly thought out character writing drills
7) no "proper" list of the Kangxi Radicals.

There are only 4 rules of stroke order mentioned, grossly inadequate.

There are no write over practice drills, just typically 3 huge characters in 48 size font to copy. This does not give the student an opportunity to anchor the motor skills for each character. There is little value in practicing writing mega-characters unless you are going to be a Chinese sign writer. There is no guidance to learn the scalability necessary to write Chinese.

The book gives an incomplete list of the Kangxi Radicals at the back of the book but the officially assigned numbering is very wrong!Also, the Matthews add strokes and characters that are not Radicals and invent a new family of Radicals! Like why use the ones that the Chinese have used for hundreds of years, right, make up your own! It the first 10 of the Radicals they have listed, not one is the correctly numbered and there are "non-radicals" in the list.

The layout and readability of the book is very mediocre.The contents page is so small that the letters and characters are barely readable. The spacing, page format and font size of the Introduction makes it hard to read. Same for the List of Radicals at the back of the book, barely readable.

The Index is excellent.

The choice of characters are excellent.

Scoring

Score

Kangxi Radicals 0/3,

There is an imcomplete chart at the back of the book listing some of the Kangxi Radicals, however, the assigned numbers are wrong. There are both strokes and characters added to their list that are not Radicals. Also, it is very difficult to read due to the size of the font that they used. In order to get their partial chart with 226 (their are 214 numbered Radicals) characters on it, they reduced the size of the letters and Chinese characters so that they are difficult to read. However, they do make an attempt. Unlike most books. But how can you give a mark for so much wrong information?

Stroke Order 0/3,

Stroke order is deemed to be the basis of literacy in writing Chinese characters. At first I thought that there was nothing written on this. then I found 4 sentences of page 9. This is pathetic. A total of 62 words to describe a very important component to writing Chinese characters.

Named Strokes 0/3,

There is nothing on this

Readability 1/3,

For some reason, the authors used a smaller than usual font size on the first six text pages of the book. Slightly less than six pages is your entire introduction to all the components to character writing, incidentally. This makes it difficult to read. These first six pages cover very little that is useful to learn to write Chinese characters.It is hard to understand as to why the authors did not use a bigger size of font.

Corrrectness 3/3,

A good indexing system is utilized. There are no information errors in the
book, just very little information.The word choices are excellent.

Writing Drills 1/3,

The writing drills are simplistic and do not do a good job at guiding the student. There is a typical page of boxes to practice in but only a monster sized character to use as a guide. Chinese students learn by overwriting characters continually downsizing until they can do it at any size, accurately. This in fact make the book about 80% empty space. Studies have shown that students benefit most from trace over character drills. This book makes no provision for the scalability necessary to learn to write characters.

Grammar 0/3,

There are no grammar guidelines

Translations 3/3,

The book is a character writing book. There are a sampling of words for each character and they are accurately translated and useful words.

Overall Usefulness 1/3

This book has a good selection of characters for introduction. It does not assault the student with too much information like the books by Phillip Yungkin Lee.It whoever fails at its purpose as it is a book to learn to write characters.

Honesty, Integrity 0/3

The subtitle of the book is;

"The Quick and Easy Method to Learn the 100 Most Basic Chinese Characters"

There is no "Quick and Easy" method to learn Chinese character writing, and given that this book, like their first, lacks all the necessary strokes, stroke order, named strokes, I think the subtitle is a big lie.

This book fails entirely at providing the essentials to writing Chinese characters. By not providing the names of the strokes, the rules of stroke order and a good representative exampling of characters,a student cannot develop character writing skills.The authors do a further dis-service by not having pronunciation rules of Hanyu Pinyin.

Overall, the student is supposed to be able to write a character without knowing the names of the strokes and the stroke order. Then the student is introduced to words without knowing how to pronounce them. This book is another incomplete effort by the team of Alison and Laurence Matthews.

Hopefully the book will serve as a template for a more
knowledgable author to write a better book.

The Mathews keep trying but keep fallng short of providing the student with a useful book.

Overall Score

9/30