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Product Description
Book Description
For over 20 years, Reading and Writing Chinese has been the standard text for beginning students of the Chinese writing system. This simplified character edition includes 1,100 new character combinations, 70 new notes on language usage and an updated introduction.
About the Author
William McNaughton teaches at Hong Kong's City University and has written many books on Chinese literature and language. Li Ying teaches at Hong Kong University.
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Most helpful customer reviews
7 of 7 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars
Standard reference,
By
This review is from: Reading And Writing Chinese Simplified Character Ed (Paperback)
Informative graded listing of the 2205 characters in the official Standard Vocabulary, together with explanation and etymology of all the standard radicals. The two-color design is easy on the eyes. Each character has a nice large diagram, pinyin, definition, a few common words using it, an illustration of the corresponding traditional character if different, and often an explanation of the radical structure. The first 1067 characters have stroke order diagrams in up to 9 steps. Often several related characters appear in sequence, which helps see the relation between the radicals.This book is really helpful in gaining the understanding of the characters that makes them so much easier to learn. My Chinese language partners affirm that it's based on genuine scholarship. My only quibble is that there's no index based on shape -- only by Pinyin and again by Pinyin grouped by number of strokes. Even in the Traditional Character edition there is an index by what kind of strokes appear in the stroke order (a bit weird, but workable), but not here. So to look up a character you don't know, you pretty much have to find the pinyin somewhere else.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta) Amazon.com:
4.1 out of 5 stars (44 customer reviews) 100 of 103 people found the following review helpful
3.0 out of 5 stars
A good list of characters, not a good standalone resource,
By Steven Grimm - Published on Amazon.com
This review is from: Reading And Writing Chinese Simplified Character Ed (Paperback)
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. 17 of 18 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars
Invaluable,
By Matthew D. Stidle - Published on Amazon.com
This review is from: Reading And Writing Chinese Simplified Character Ed (Paperback)
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. 33 of 39 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars
A Beautiful Picture of Chinese Characters,
By William T. Knipe "Bill K." - Published on Amazon.com
This review is from: Reading And Writing Chinese Simplified Character Ed (Paperback)
Forget the other character books ! This is the one thatwill 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. |
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