What's in a Chinese Character [Paperback]

Tan Huay Peng (Author)

Product Details

• Paperback: 195 pages
• Publisher: New World Press (November 1, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 7800055159
• ISBN-13: 978-7800055157
• Product Dimensions: 10.3 x 7.3 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.7 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #771,465 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

35 of 35 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Amazing!! Philosophy of the language, January 18, 2006

By 

John Shiren "Xie Xie" (Hartland WI) - See all my reviews

This review is from: What's in a Chinese Character (Paperback)

This book is amazing! The publisher should really let Amazon show you a couple sample pages - that would tell the story much better than my description. But since they have not - here is my attempt:

The author attempts to trace the lineage and reasons for each of the characters in this book (there are about 100,000 chinese characters - he only shows 2 per page in this 185 page book). In chinese each character is a word. It seems most characters are composits of 2 characters. He looks at the shapes to see if he can make pictographic sense of the characters and radicals. And he draws cartoons of what he sees, and adds explanations and even lists some similar words.

Sometimes his explanations are more of a strech than others. Sometimes it is very clear and very insightful. By understanding what goes into a language or, in this case - that is when every character is its own word - the written language is its OWN language, you gain insights into the world and how the people understand it. In this respect it is heavy duty philoosphy.

Like another reviewer I borrowed this book. Within minutes I was convinced I have to own it - it is worth spending LOTS of time studying. And it is worth spending lots of time also because it is enjoyable - simply fascinating.

13 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Great aid for learning chinese!!, March 19, 2006

By 

ALFONSO (Cali, Colombia) - See all my reviews
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Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: What's in a Chinese Character (Paperback)

I am in the process of learning chinese and this is a fantastic book and tool to learn how to read it and write it. You can learn the basic radicals or roots of the most important or common words.
Congratulations to the author for writing this gem and my thanks to the other 2 reviewers for helping me to find it!

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Hits the mark, December 3, 2008

By 

JB (New York, NY United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: What's in a Chinese Character (Paperback)

John Shiren's review is great. I don't have much to add to that. However, I would like to point out that Isaac Liao's review is misleading if not completely incorrect. The book does talk about traditional characters, just not for every single character. As I pointed out in my comment to his post, it also does not talk about every single iteration of a character throughout history, because that is not the point of the book. The point of the book is to learn to read and write the characters, and learn a little bit about the history of the character. In this respect it hits the mark. It has helped me to make headway in learning and remember characters, and I would highly recommend it.