7 of 7 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars
Standard reference, Nov 19 2007
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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