Customer Reviews

Read and Write Chinese: A Simplified Guide to the Chinese Characters

5 star:		(13)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

I felt that the large font used for the Chinese characters helped in locating many characters in the dictionary. For anyone who has ever used a traditional Chinese dictionary, they usually have a tiny typeface capable of inducing severe headaches! Not so here! These Chinese characters are large and bold! Very nice feature, also including the cantonese pronuciation along with the mandarin. This feature alone makes the book worth twice what it is. The step by step drawings for each Chinese character are a great help. I highly recommend this book to any student of Chinese. It has helped me in my studies and I keep it with me everywhere. Also, each character is assigned a number which makes easy locating when I study. This is a great help. The multiple systems of looking up a word are also helpful. They include English, Mandarin PinYin, Cantonese, Stroke Number, and Frequency. Highly recommended. You won't be sorry.

Do not buy this book expecting to be able to use it for anything more than a reference to look up individual characters; it contains no compounds. It is not easy to use when looking up by pronunciation because the index includes no tones. The English definitions are not enough that you can use the word because it does not list whether or not the character is as bound morpheme, that is can it be used by itself or only with another character. In addition, it only gives traditional characters, but simplified characters are at least equally as important for any student of Chinese as a foreign language as the traditional ones. If I were comparing this book to other foreign language books in other languages I would not recomend it, but because of the shortage of Chinese language materials, and the price, it will probably be useful if you cannot afford as big character that would cost around $70.

This book is a useful guide to Chinese characters, although it has many shortcomings and flaws. It lists 3,200 characters with both their Mandarin and Cantonese pronunciations, and their most common meanings. The main character of each entry is printed large, and the stroke order of the character is given. The relative frequency of occurence of each character is also given. However, no indication of how the characters are used is made, nor are any compounds included in the entries.

The characters are listed in the traditional order according to the Kangxi radicals. The book has indices which list characters according to their Mandarin and Cantonese pronunciations, but they of limited use because the tones are not distinguished in the indices. Moreover, the index lists page references rather than characters themselves, which makes it very tedious to find a character by means of the pronunciation as each page listed has to be checked. There is also an index of meanings, but again, only page references are given, and the meanings are not comprehensive enough to be useful. Basically, one must be familiar with the Kangxi radical system in order to locate characters with any speed.

The Cantonese pronunciations of characters are a great boon to this book, setting it apart from other similar works. However, the merit of this feature is marred by the fact that the vulgar Cantonese pronunciations are given for some characters, instead of the proper ones. These pronunciations are commonly heard in Hong Kong slang, but are nonetheless incorrect.

All in all, this book is generally useful, particularly for its Cantonese pronunciations. The definitions given are brief, and the characters are large and clear. This book is a character text suitable for the beginner in Cantonese or Mandarin.

I've only used this book to lookup/review Cantonese characters, and it is very good for that. However, the author really should include some simplified characters now that Hong Kong & Macau have been returned to China. Also, if you have internet access, online dictionaries will a better job (more characters, more romanization methods...) plus provide verbal pronunciation.

This is great book if you are studying the art form of chinese characters. It is one of the only books available with an index of the characters in English which makes it invaluable. I highly recommend it.

This book is wonderful and I do not consider that having only unsimplified forms of the characters is a flaw. While simplifid characters are more useful in Mainland China, they are not used at all in Taiwan, Hong Kong or Singapore and are only used rarely in Chinese communities in the U.S. and Canada. This book is most useful when visiting one of these places or studying there, since it is well nigh impossible to find an unsimplified guide or dictionary in most book stores. Also, it provides pronunciation in "bopomofo" the phonetic system used in Taiwan by foreigners and natives alike, far superioir to Wades-Giles or Pinyin.

_Read and Write Chinese_ lists 3,200 useful characters and is very easy to use. You simply look up the character you want in the English, Cantonese romanization, or Mandarin romanization index and you are referred to the proper page(s). Each character also contains a reference number, Mandarin pronounciation, and Cantonese pronounciation. Each character contains a stroke order chart.

There is a calligraphy tutorial, a section on determining the character's radical, a radical index, and indices by Mandarin, Cantonese and English.

This is a handy book to have. If you have ever used a Chinese dictionary, you will agree looking up words by Mandarin or Cantonese romanization is much easier. However, _Read and Write Chinese_ doesn't take the place of a good Chinese-English dictionary for it doesn't contain compounds. For example, you can find "ship" (chuan) and "chief" (zhang) but you cannot find the combination of these characters which produces "ship's captain" (chuan-zhang).

Otherwise, _Read and Write Chinese_ delivers what it promises, an easy guide to Chinese characters.

In the category of reference and learning tools for the study of Chinese, Rita Choy's book is the best one I have encountered. Among its unusual features, each of the 3,200 words include the Cantonese pronunciation as well as the Mandarin pronunciation. Furthermore, the publisher also sells audiotapes of a native speaker pronouncing each word in this book. At only $12, this useful book is a bargain for anyone studying Chinese. Traditional dictionaries, which costs many times more, are time consuming and difficult to use. Choy's book allows you to locate a word by number of strokes, English definition, Cantonese pronunciation and Mandarin pronunciation as well as the traditional radical approach. As such, the book is an easy low cost substitute for the beginning/intermediate student and a convenient supplement for the advanced student. In addition to its usefulness as a dictionary, Choy's book is also great for the student who want to focus on the more common words because a frequency indicator accompanies each word entry. Although I unequivocally recommend this book, there are flaws worth noting. While not excessive, this book does contain more errors than you would find in a traditional dictionary. It also does not consistently include all the alternate ways to pronounce and write each word.

This book is an excellent source of learning material, but to clarify the misunderstanding observed by the reader from Atlanta, perhaps a future edition should be retitled "Understanding Traditional Chinese".

In any case, despite the fact that simplified characters are used throughout mainland China, they are useless in that they are not much faster to write (which was their original intended purpose) and make the language more difficult by forcing students to learn BOTH the traditional AND simplified characters. Furthermore, the many students I've met over the past few years from mainland China, who don't always know the traditional character equivalent of their simplified ones, are losing touch with their culture which has been embedded in the intricacies of how the traditional characters developed from pictographs.

Zakarius

If you've ever learned Chinese you know about the endless amounts of individual charactors that must be memorized. This book conviniently packages every useful charactor in the Chinese language into this neat little book, so that you need look no where else. If you can already speak Chinese at a native speaker level, and am proficient with Chinese grammar, then this book will be a big help in learning how to write the language. Warning though, this book is NOT for beginners.