Customer Reviews

Teach Yourself Beginners Chinese Script : An Introduction to Reading and Writing Chinese

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

 

 

This book is the first I have come across that teaches Chinese characters by helping the reader to understand how they are formed. Other books plunge right into the presentation of characters that must be memorized, quickly overwhelming the reader.

In this book you will understand the logic behind the evolution of the characters, the use of radicals in compound characters, the composition of multiple character words, interpretation of characters in context, and how to correctly write these characters yourself. Elizabeth Scurfield explains the rules behind stroke order and gives many examples as the characters progress from simple to more complex. Each unit builds logically on the preceding unit, so learning is gradual and easy.

If you are just beginning to learn Chinese writing, I couldn't recommend this book more highly. You will need to look elsewhere to learn the spoken language, not much help here (although Elizabeth Scurfield does have another very good book that teaches both reading and speaking Mandarin). Once you have mastered the material in this book, you will need to find a more advanced book if you wish to become proficient. This truly is just a beginning - but a very good one.

This book is really fantastic. It shows you the basics for the chinese script origin and gives you a basic understanding of the written language by associating it with everyday situations. Through the numerous examples from real chinese setrtings it teaches you how to guess a possible meaning for a character by noticing its background (e.g. if it is on a restaurant menu, airport lounge information etc.) and compounds. This is particularily important for the everyday traveller to China who doesn't have the time to learn a lot of characters but has the basic intelligence to associate a character with its possible meaning. It also has a very practical pronounciation guide and a guide to chinese computer input methods at the end of the book but unfortunately doesn't give the pinyin for all the characters that are presented in the book.

I am a beginner to learning Chinese and I find this book an excellent guide to understanding chinese characters, its components and why. I recommend this book to anyone who wish to be able to recognize and read chinese characters. The author has provided an excellent description regarding the radicals and phonetic components of chinese characters.

This book is basically to introduce the concepts of Chinese script.

If you are new to Chinese, just starting out, I would recommend this book.

Because Chinese script does not have a direct correlation to speaking as western languages do. Chinese dialects are more different than French and Spanish are different in terms of speaking. But, interestingly, they use the same characters in all the dialects for script. Thus they are called dialects instead of languages. (Although the Chinese dialects are spoken differently like different languages, they use the same written symbols.) Because of this nature, some people prefer to learn Chinese script writing and reading seperately from speaking.

For example one may choose to learn speaking by using the Pimsleaur excellant audio course and afterwards learn Chinese script. Or one could learn speech by using Pinyin, using a western alphabit.

Or it may be that you just want to learn to read and write Chinese.

This book is an inexpensive easy place to start to get a feel for Chinese script. By its self this book will not make you literate in Chinese. It is just a starting place to understand the concepts of Chinese language script.

The authors' methodology is to ask questions that you probably won't be able to answer, to get you to think about the concepts and then goes on to expalin the reasoning.

If you are curious about Chinese script, just want to get a feel for how it works, and don't want to spend a lot of money; then I would recommend this book for you.

The one problem I had with this book is that sometimes the characters are printed too small to see all the strokes. The strokes sort of blend in togeather.

To be literate in Chinese script, you will need to purchase more advanced books.

My work with this book has been reduced to memorizing the various characters that come with the book. The exercises, while plentiful, would be a lot more helpful if they stuck to helping the reader learn characters that it had introduced, rather than characters containing the radicals it teaches. I can't imagine I'd have accomplished much if I hadn't already been familiar with many of the meanings of the characters from my work with Japanese. The cultural points made in the book are too few and far between. Overall, making through later chapters becomes drudgery. Perhaps 'Teach Yourself Chinese' is better?

I am in Beijing at the moment, working and trying to learn the language and although I don't normally write reivews I was moved to by the sheer illogical nature of this book. The characters are put alongside the English definitions without pinyin to help with the pronunciation! What is the point in learning characters if you can't vocalise them?

I cant imagine that there is anyone who wants to learn chinese script without being able to speak first or practice their learning by speaking?!! Even if you want to write first then it would be a good and logical learning tool to be able to learn the sound at the same time as writing the character!!!

As someone whos family is 1/2 Chinese, and who understands a little Cantonese I found this book almost impenetrable! As early as page 4 it asks you to 'remember' things it never told you! By page 10 the average western reader will have resigned this volume to propping up a wobbly fridge, Which is about as useful as this book will EVER be to it's stated target audience.....

I learned more about reading Chinese from my 6-Y/O niece who attends Chinese School!

Presumaby Ms Scurfield understands A Chinese language (which one? I wonder!) and logic better than she does English! to the beginner in Chinese this is worse than useless. To those who might have learned a little of one of the spoken Chinese languages...... Well it didn't help me; and I CAN hold my own in Cantonese!

Don't waste your money; why they spared ink on this is beyond me!

The content is alright, but I'm giving this book a poor rating because of how horribly it is bound. I got this book only three days ago and today it is literally falling apart. I mean there are about fifteen pages coming out right now. I'm a bibliophile and not one to mistreat my precious books, so it is not due to any fault of mine that this book is falling apart; it is just terribly bound. It's like they took Elmer's glue to hold the pages together. Oh my God it is so bad...

The content is okay, but good luck opening it for the first time without twenty pages flying out.

I wish more of these language books would come in hardcover.

It is one thing to learn Chinese in a classroom because you have to, it is another thing to learn Chinese because you want to learn it. Learning by route memorization is no match for learning by "going out" memorization. If you want to spend years learning enough Chinese to read a Chinese book, but in the meantime, if what you really want to do is go out into a Chinese community and find your way around, there is no other better way to do it then by reading this book. I use it when I'm in China where I am all alone with no guide, and it is tremendously helpful. I can't read a newspaper yet, but a newspaper isn't for communicating to other people with or getting around town by yourself. Besides, in China, people are more interested in your social skills then your know-it-all skills.

When I bought this book, I was hoping I could learn how to read AND write Chinese characters, but this book did not achieve this goal. The book only dedicates one chapter for writing Chinese characters and hardly gives the stroke order of other characters in later chapters. Also, it never shows you the written forms of characters which can be different from the computer typed forms. The book is also very overwhelming by presenting a lot of characters in a short period of time. The only logic I see to this is developing your reading skills, which is good. That's why I give this book three stars. However, when I tried to write the characters, it was very difficult. One last thing I do not like about the book is that it only presents simplified characters. It is necessary to learn both Simplified and Traditional Characters in order to understand Chinese, since Traditional characters are becoming more popular lately. A good book for learnig how to write both Simplified and Traditional Characters is 250 Essential Chinese Characters for every day use (Volumes 1 and 2)By Philip Yungkin Lee.