Reading & Writing Chinese Simplified Character Edition

If you are a BEGINNER OF CHINESE please read my entire post it may prove extremely useful to you. Basically this book and all Chinese books must be used along with other aids in order to achieve proficiency. The book its self is excellent quality and good composition but if you truly wish to be proficient in reading and writing Chinese it will require more resources than one book. This book is a great start and great resource to reading and writing but you will also need a good dictionary to see all the ways these characters are used together, and on top of that a grammar book and some audio guides for pronunciation and verbal skills. Chinese words typically are two or more characters many times four and sometimes more the four character sets are like expressions usually called idioms, both the two and four character sets are extremely important to your comprehension of Chinese if you wish to be fluent. Also you have to ask yourself if you wish to learn simplified or traditional Chinese that depends on where you will use it. Simplified it used by the mainland aka china and traditional is used by Hong Kong, Taiwan, and many Chinese communities outside of china such as United States. You will also need to determine which spoken language to learn, if your business will be on the mainland (excluding Hong Kong) or Taipei Taiwan then you should learn to speak Mandarin but if you business will mostly be in Hong Kong or America then most of those Chinese will speak a dialect of Cantonese. Many beginners may not know the difference but Mandarin and Cantonese are less dialects and more like different languages being unintelligible. After all this if you decide to go with simplified Chinese and Mandarin accordingly then I can recommend some books and sites that might be of great aid to you, they are as follows: Reading and Writing Chinese: Simplified character edition (book I'm reviewing) Modern Mandarin Chinese Grammar Oxford Beginner's Chinese Dictionary Chinese-English Frequency Dictionary: A Study Guide to Mandarin Chinese's 500 Most Frequently Used Words Those books are good for a student that studies simplified characters. All four are very useful and important. for students of traditional characters these books will be suited well enough. Reading and Writing Chinese: A comprehensive guide to the Chinese writing system (note that this book is really just the Traditional character version of the book I'm reviewing.) Chinese Characters A Genealogy and Dictionary Modern Mandarin Chinese Grammar, because this book shows most of its examples and both simplified and traditional Chinese. If you study Simplified Characters make sure your dictionary is in simplified as well, and with Traditional Characters make sure its in Traditional. note theres more dictionaries available for Traditional than for Simplified but either way you should be able to find some good dictionaries. A matter of fact I would personally recommend having two good dic

Prof. McNaughton's Simplified Character edition is marvelous and so practical for the serious English-speaking student of Chinese. Quick-reference radical tables in front and back covers show more radical names than any other reference I've seen yet. McNaughton's pedagogical introduction gives the student a warm fuzzy feeling that every basic and intermediate level character is in here, described with "stories" and introduced in an order which helped me recall more hanzi than with other texts. By spending 15-30 minutes a day with this book, I rapidly beefed up my character recognition for reading. Large stroke-order diagrams are also included for each hanzi. Just reviewing stroke order for each one in my head gave me a better sense of how to write them than simply trying to remember the confusing, conflicted and exception-ridden "rules of stroke order" we see in so many textbooks. My background: I have been seriously studying Mandarin and written Chinese for 3.5 years with a tutor. I am 37 years old and travel to China a few times a year with work duties. While this book was written for the kind of structured classwork study available at universities, I also found this book an indispensible reference in my own private studies.

As a new student of Chinese calligraphy, I found this book to be extremely helpful. It shows stroke order, a big plus for novices and non-chinese speakers, in my opinion. It cross-references characters within the book, for comparison purposes. It also describes the characters, which helps make connections enabling memory of learned characters.

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.