Customer Reviews

What's in a Chinese Character

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

 

 

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.

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!

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.

A very intuitive book with a historical approach to chinese characters.
It helps one learn some of the basic characters and even read some characters from ancient chinese scripts.

I have been studying Mandarin Chinese for just over a year. I found this book to be a fascinating one. I read a borrowed copy and now just ordered my own. It might less interesting for someone who is not studying Chinese characters, but for those who want to learn to read, it is excellent.

Given that this is a book explaining the origin of characters and their eventual evolution, it is absolutely unforgivable that such a well conceived book would completely use Simplified Chinese, without any Traditional Chinese. The book sets out to explain the evolution of characters through pictures and stories. I very much like the concept and give the author credit for that, but use of Simplified Chinese for the entire book warrants at least a 3 star deduction. I understand that some will not have any qualms about this, but the truth is, Traditional Chinese is much closer in form to the original pictographs. Simplified is just that..."Simplified", like an abbreviation. You don't catch any other language being taught using abbreviations so why Chinese. Some will argue it's because the words are hard to write and memorize, but I would disagree in the sense that many of the simplified characters have lost so much in the way of strokes and form that they no longer even look like their full form or the original pictographic forms. If you are looking for an alternative to this product, I would suggest Sukming Lo's book Picture Chinese: Art as Language as a better alternative. You can find it at your local bookstore and it presents BOTH the Traditional and the Simplified. The pictures are also very colorful and often drawn in a way where they mimic the original character.

Mao Tse-tung destroyed many things in mainland China, among other things the written Chinese Characters, which had existed for hundreds if not thousands of years before him. Certainly anyone seeking to teach the origins of Chinese Characters should have used only the Traditional characters, and not the so-called simplified version, which many Chinese totally reject, along with the entire country of Taiwan. I don't object to having the simplified version showing for those who would now want to learn the true way to write characters, but to omit the traditional version and only provide the simplified version is totally unforgivable. I was happy to see this book added to Amazon's fine store of books on Chinese, and was all set to order it until I read the review showing that it only provided the Simplified Characters -- now I will not. This should have been clearly revealed in the descriptive text for this book, and not left it to be mentioned by a reviewer only. Charles Wilkes