Customer Reviews

Reading & Writing Chinese: Simplified Character Edition

5 star:		(23)
4 star:		(10)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

I started learning to write Chinese by working my way through this book, memorizing the characters, pronunciation, and definitions. Now I sort of regret it. The list of characters is reasonable enough. If your goal is to memorize a bunch of characters, these are good ones to concentrate on, and they're generally presented in a reasonable order. The stroke order diagrams are helpful when you're first starting out, and it isn't a problem that they're only present for the first half of the list of characters; by the time you finish the part of the book with the diagrams, you will have long since developed a good intuitive sense of the stroke order rules.

Unfortunately, beyond the selection of characters and the diagrams, it kind of falls short.

My biggest complaint is that the definitions are often not good. When a character has multiple meanings (as most of them do) you can't count on the most common meaning being first in the list, and in some cases common meanings aren't listed at all. If you're using the definitions to make flashcards, you'll be frustrated by the number of times two characters are given exactly the same English definition, even though in reality they differ in connotation or in usage.

There is never any distinction made between characters that stand as words on their own and characters that only ever appear as parts of compound words, which will definitely trip you up a lot if you're using this as a source of vocabulary. And the compound words are sometimes obscure or very old-fashioned terms that, if you say them to a Chinese speaker, will cause them to give you a puzzled look and ask where the heck you learned THAT old word.

The font used for the characters is a typewritten one. If you learn to write the characters as printed in this book, you will end up writing in a very precise but somewhat mechanical-looking style rather than a more artistic handwritten style. Whether that's a plus or a minus is up to your sense of aesthetics. The traditional character edition of this book uses a handwritten font; even though I'm primarily learning simplified characters, if I had it to do over again I'd have picked up that edition instead. (Both editions actually contain both character forms; the difference is mostly the font and the order of the entries.)

If you get this book, use it as a list of characters to learn and a large collection of stroke order diagrams. Keep a real dictionary handy and it'll be a worthwhile learning resource.

Forget the other character books ! This is the one that
will get you over this hurdle ! Clear and sharp pictures of
every character, together with stroke order, pronunciation and
relation to other characters. Go after the big first thousand,
and then you will be ready to tackle the following 2000. This
book points out all the dangers and traps you'll run into in
your quest for mastery. You'll love it and keep it under your
pillow ! Bill K.

This book has been the single most important resource in developing my budding ability to read and write Chinese. The concept of introducing the most fundamental radicals before even the very common characters that employ them is wonderful...I took a year of Chinese in college and struggled to learn the characters with almost nothing to grasp on to, struggling to memorize what seemed like totally arbitrary pictures.

This book first introduces the building blocks of each character -- the radicals -- and then explains to you how their sounds and meanings combine to form new, complex characters. Now every time I come upon a new character in a textbook I am learning from, I look it up in this book to see if there is a clever mnemonic or phonetic element that will help me remember it more easily. A great help.

If you are a BEGINNER OF CHINESE please read my entire post it may prove extremely useful to you.

Basically this book and all Chinese books must be used along with other aids in order to achieve proficiency. The book its self is excellent quality and good composition but if you truly wish to be proficient in reading and writing Chinese it will require more resources than one book.

This book is a great start and great resource to reading and writing but you will also need a good dictionary to see all the ways these characters are used together, and on top of that a grammar book and some audio guides for pronunciation and verbal skills.

Chinese words typically are two or more characters many times four and sometimes more the four character sets are like expressions usually called idioms, both the two and four character sets are extremely important to your comprehension of Chinese if you wish to be fluent.

Also you have to ask yourself if you wish to learn simplified or traditional Chinese that depends on where you will use it. Simplified it used by the mainland aka china and traditional is used by Hong Kong, Taiwan, and many Chinese communities outside of china such as United States.

You will also need to determine which spoken language to learn, if your business will be on the mainland (excluding Hong Kong) or Taipei Taiwan then you should learn to speak Mandarin but if you business will mostly be in Hong Kong or America then most of those Chinese will speak a dialect of Cantonese. Many beginners may not know the difference but Mandarin and Cantonese are less dialects and more like different languages being unintelligible.

After all this if you decide to go with simplified Chinese and Mandarin accordingly then I can recommend some books and sites that might be of great aid to you, they are as follows:

Reading and Writing Chinese: Simplified character edition (book I'm reviewing)
Modern Mandarin Chinese Grammar
Oxford Beginner's Chinese Dictionary
Chinese-English Frequency Dictionary: A Study Guide to Mandarin Chinese's 500 Most Frequently Used Words

Those books are good for a student that studies simplified characters. All four are very useful and important.

for students of traditional characters these books will be suited well enough.

Reading and Writing Chinese: A comprehensive guide to the Chinese writing system
(note that this book is really just the Traditional character version of the book I'm reviewing.)
Chinese Characters A Genealogy and Dictionary
Modern Mandarin Chinese Grammar, because this book shows most of its examples and both simplified and traditional Chinese.

If you study Simplified Characters make sure your dictionary is in simplified as well, and with Traditional Characters make sure its in Traditional.

note theres more dictionaries available for Traditional than for Simplified but either way you should be able to find some good dictionaries. A matter of fact I would personally recommend having two good dictionaries for good measure.

The sites assuming they're still working:

http://www.chinese-tools.com/
http://www.zhongwen.com/
http://www.chinese-lessons.com/

chinese-lessons.com seems to be particularly good for pronunciation guide and absolute beginner.

After you have built a decent knowledge-base of Chinese characters and words then you may wish to buy some Chinese comic books to encourage your reading skills. Personally I like Japanese comics ( Manga ) so what I do is order Chinese language versions of Japanese Manga. Chinese version manga are typical written in Traditional characters, mainly from Taiwan and Hong Kong.

I also recommend watching Chinese movies if study Mandarin make sure they're in mandarin if Cantonese make sure they are in Cantonese, many movies have both options from the menu.

Do your best and don't forget to have fun

As a new student of Chinese calligraphy, I found this book to be extremely helpful.
It shows stroke order, a big plus for novices and non-chinese speakers, in my opinion.
It cross-references characters within the book, for comparison purposes.
It also describes the characters, which helps make connections enabling memory of learned characters.

The problems K. Buckshi notes are real, and therefore I'm not giving this five stars.

That doesn't mean it's not worthwhile. This has helped me immensely in reading and mastering characters: pinyin pronunciations, stroke order, definitions, and compounds are among areas covered.

This is definitely a useful book, in spite of its problems.

Take a look "inside the book" and you'll see the intention: a systematic approach to learning the characters you'll need for the HSK. I use it with a good dictionary (1982 Hanyu Cidian) to get all the meanings. Some very positive points for the learner:

1. Large, clear characters, with stroke order for the first 1000 or so
2. Introduces radicals as needed; these are the same 214 as the Hanyu Cidian
3. Shows traditional characters in parens, and if there are several traditional chars. combined into one simplified, shows which meaning goes where
4. Often has explanations of the "etymology" of the character
5. Excellent quality: thick paper, sturdy binding, attractive printing, large characters
6. Order of learning is fairly logical

What could be better:
1. Show the radical for each character; of course many are easy to figure out but others not!
2. Include another index by radical and stroke (like a dictionary)
3. Add some more explanations
4. In the case of multiple readings, be clear which are on the A, B, C, D or no list
5. Maybe separate multiple readings, as is done with zhe/zhuo/zhao

The same space is used for each character; I can see why but this gets very cramped later on with all the example words (ci); why not have variable-sized entries?

As others have said, it is not a dictionary, and should not be. Use it with a good dictionary.

The first entry I looked up in the index, 'xiang(1,4)', was listed as being on p 368 but in reality was on p 386. Pretty bad for a reference book, where being able to look things up is kind of important. Looks like they learned nothing from publishing the original, traditional characters, version. That index was also error-ridden.

This could've been a very useful book if they had hired an editor or even a proofreader. Shameful job.

If at all there is a single book to learn Mandarin Chinese script, this is certainly not the one. Once the expectations are made reasonable, this is indeed a great book for a beginner. The book is very well produced, on thick paper, with an attractive layout, and it is as well organized as a military camp! Although it is an encyclopedic listing of Mandarin ("man daring"?) characters, I found it to be quite interesting to skim through, and found a few characters to be quite cute.

The author does a remarkable job in trying to make sense of a non alphabetical script that does not lend itself to any such attempt. Characters are grouped by number of strokes they contain, by numbers 1-1000 (there are 6-50,000 characters, I am told), and by English alphabetical order. None of these makes learning the script any less intimidating. Let's admit that the energy expenditure has to be weighed against the desired gain.

Learning by immersion ("sink or swim") may be the best method to learn a language, but it is not relevant here. Next is learning to read and write its alphabet, which is apparently not the case with the Chinese language. I have tried CDs and tapes of conversational Chinese, but to memorize hundreds of meaningless phrases is hardly better than mastering the (non)alphabet.

Ordinarily, learning through the grammar and usage is not considered a good method. However, I found it to be more practical for learning Chinese. I bought Claudia Ross' book Modern Mandarin Chinese Grammar (Modern Grammars) (see my review), and the McNaughton's book at the same time. The Ross' book gives an adequate introduction to the grammar, and the remaining 3/4 of the book gives its application. I could begin to learn conversational Chinese fairly easily and painlessly. The present book satisfied my curiosity, and and curbed my unwarranted jubilation.

I have tried creatively to simplify and teach foreign languages to a native English speaker with varying success Sanskrit: An Appreciation Without Apprehension, A Crash Course to Learn the Gujarati Script (Setubandh Language Series Volume: 3), and A programmed text to learn Gujarati (Setubandh language series). I wish to find a simpler way to learn/teach Mandarin Chinese. Pending that, I highly recommend both, Ross' and McNaughton's books, which are complementary.

Prof. McNaughton's Simplified Character edition is marvelous and so practical for the serious English-speaking student of Chinese. Quick-reference radical tables in front and back covers show more radical names than any other reference I've seen yet. McNaughton's pedagogical introduction gives the student a warm fuzzy feeling that every basic and intermediate level character is in here, described with "stories" and introduced in an order which helped me recall more hanzi than with other texts. By spending 15-30 minutes a day with this book, I rapidly beefed up my character recognition for reading.

Large stroke-order diagrams are also included for each hanzi. Just reviewing stroke order for each one in my head gave me a better sense of how to write them than simply trying to remember the confusing, conflicted and exception-ridden "rules of stroke order" we see in so many textbooks.

My background: I have been seriously studying Mandarin and written Chinese for 3.5 years with a tutor. I am 37 years old and travel to China a few times a year with work duties. While this book was written for the kind of structured classwork study available at universities, I also found this book an indispensible reference in my own private studies.