Customer Reviews

Understanding Chinese Characters by Their Ancestral Forms (Chinese and English Edition)

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I have been studying Mandarin for several years, and this was one of the very first books I purchased.

It was difficult for me to begin study of a character-based language because, unlike Spanish or French, Chinese characters lack correlation to the Roman-based alphabet, phonetics, and word construction. This book was wonderful in helping me learn Chinese characters because it made them relevant and interesting. Once I formed a good base, I found it easier and easier to learn more characters.

I would definitely recommend this book to anyone starting out with Chinese.

Now in its fourth edition, Understanding Chinese Characters By Their Ancestral Forms by Ping-gam Go reveals the meaning of Chinese writing by providing and describing the historical pictograph for each Chinese character, thereby materially aiding the reader to identify, learn and memorize the most widely used Chinese characters with a minimum of effort. Enhanced with a full-color photo survey of business establishment signage in San Francisco's Chinatown, and a dictionary of 288 Chinese characters containing both Mandarin and Cantonese pronunciation), students and tourists are offered dozens of practice exercises to memorize the meanings of those Chinatown signs. There are even flashcards for 41 of the most prevalent characters found on a Chinese restaurant menu!. Compact and portably, with alphabetical and subject indexes to dictionary entries, Understanding Chinese Characters By Their Ancestral Forms is a welcome and "user friendly" resource for learning to decipher Chinese writing whether for simply fun or serious business. Also very highly recommended from Simplex Publications are two other Chinese language instructionals by Ping-gam Go: Read Chinese Today: A Walk Thro-ugh San Francisco's Chinatown, Understanding Chinese Characters By Their Ancestral Forms With Photographs And Map (0962311332, $6.95); What Character Is That?: An Easy-Access Dictionary Of 5,000 Chinese Characters, 2nd Edition (0962311359, $19.95).

This was a pretty fun book to read and learn Chinese hanzi. The book uses traditional characters only. It it helpful to learn common characters that you might see on buildings in Chinese American cities. The book could be improved by including the pinyin system and also providing the simplified versions of the characters. The end of the book has some pronunciations, but most of them are inaccurate.

Wow! I wish I had this book before I started studying the Chinese language. Knowing the symbology of the characters makes the language and culture so much more accessible. A "Walk Through Chinatown" will never be the same! I'm giving this book as a Christmas present this year.

For anyone wanting to learn a little Chinese, be aware that this book is aiming at people who will go into places where Traditional Chinese is used rather than Simplified Chinese. (Basically San Francisco California, Taiwan, Indonesia and anywhere else outside of Mainland China). If you are going to Mainland China, the characters used in this book have more detail than you will need because the system was changed in the 1950's in mainland China.

Ok, so for the promised aim of this book, teaching you to understand Chinese Characters by their ancestral forms, this book delivers a home run. It's easy to understand, has gone through four editions, and includes some excellent tools for growing in your knowledge of Chinese characters.

In short the material is organized by two methods. First the original stylus forms for each character are used. (This book only teaches 288 characters out of many thousands possible to study). The argument (and it's a good one) is that original stylus drawings of characters communicated a clear concept. The development of a brushed character tended to obscure that original concept in favor of writing speed and convenience. This book is further organized into what some may call Semantic Domains (they don't use the term semantic domain but that's what they are doing). This idea takes all characters and organizes them around categories. So for example all characters for animals are organized into one group and laid out side by side so that the learner can see patterns and differences. This enables groups of words to be learned relatively quickly. This book has an alphabetical index as well as a semantical domain index. It also has a simple character identifier that helps figure out the core idea of a character. It's GREAT!

In addition this book contains stylus characters next to brushed characters so you can see the relationship and the difference. The stylus of a moon is clearly like a moon anyone would draw. As an example though the character for moon is not so clear, in fact I would not have guessed it was moon right off. It resembles more like an ear or just a some random character. But when you line up the stylus of moon next to the brushed character of moon you immediately see it!

In essence this approach blends history, visual comparisons and the semantical domain approach into one very unique product that is well worth purchasing if you are learning Chinese for any of the locations I mention above. The icing on this cake (so to speak) is that the book has about 10 pages of characters that can easily be photocopied and enlarged (I recommend card stock paper). They can then be cut up to make a set of 288 flash cards to help you learn the commonly used characters presented in this book.

If you are learning spoken Mandarin and want to know even a little bit about Chinese characters, I cannot imagine a simpler and more interesting or more effective approach. If one exists, please let me know! I highly recommend this book!

Chinese reading/writing can be an intimidating subject for new students, but what better way to start than understanding what all those signs in Chinatown mean? The author Ping-gam Go did a wonderful job with this book. He included color photographs of signs from Chinatown in San Francisco. This book teaches the reader to understand how to read traditional Chinese characters. Each word is described in context of its historical pictograph background, going back thousands of years in Chinese history. Many of the Chinese characters actually look like the thing they describe. With this knowledge, memorization of the characters was much easier for me. I found myself recognizing many words in Chinatown thereafter. This book is very thin (less than 100 pages) but it packs a wollop with the knowledge it conveys. There are several hundred characters defined/described in it, and if you can remember half of them, you're on your way to learning Chinese. It doesn't teach writing at all, but if you understand basic Chinese caligraphy, you can figure it out yourself. By itself, this book is insufficient to learn to read/write Chinese. It is a great companion book to a more in depth text on the subject. However, Ping-gam Go is quite successful with his goal. Even after reading a few pages, I was able to walk through Chinatown recognizing characters I've never known before, and it was like a whole new world opening up. Highly recommended!

Ping-Gam creates a vivid survey of current Chinese writing visible in San Francisco's Chinatown, revealing the hidden art, myth, and culture within the characters of the written language through ancestral forms.

Learning 5000 Chinese characters is a daunting task. It often is a question where and how to start. This book is quite novel in that it presents the most important characters by also showing the original ancient pictoral form. In that way it is easier to remember the modern character. And once one is getting used to the Chinese characters, it then is easier to remember more.

So many of the books out there are really not user-friendly. In fact, they tend to confuse more than help, but this book is very different. It truly makes understanding Chinese characters very easy and is helping my son to commit what he's learned to memory, the key he was seeking. He won't be taking Chinese officially until next year, but this book has given him a leg up & will definitely be attending college with him next year. We highly recommend "Understanding Chinese Characters by Their Ancestral Forms", by Ping-Gam Go!

The author Ping-gam Go has made learning Chinese so easy and alot of fun. He does this by giving us the historical evolution of the characters and including pictures of them. The book is also compact and portable -I carry it around with me and look up Chinese characters that I see! I've bought a few copies for my friends who are learning Chinese and they all love it!