Product Description

Whether on a train from Beijing to Shanghai or sitting under a tree in Berkeley, you can be practicing your Chinese with this quick and easy-to-use set of flashcards. Chinese in a Flash Volume 1 has a full range of features to help beginners and intermediate learners through character recognition, vocabulary recognition, revision, and testing. It includes indexes by radical, stroke count, and alphabetically by pinyin romanization.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #83495 in Books
• Published on: 2003-11-15
• Format: Box set
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Cards
• 16 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9780804833615
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
• Click here to view our Condition Guide and Shipping Prices

From the Inside Flap

About the Author
Philip Yungkin Lee, a native speaker of Chinese, is a Senior Lecturer at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia. He has published several language learning titles and has received a Teaching Excellence award form his University.

Customer Reviews

As good as it gets
These are really wonderful aids and do all that a flashcard can be asked to do. Also, they DO provide a very detailed stroke order- I am puzzled why so many reviews comment that there is no stroke order. Perhaps there was an earlier edition? I will take and upload a photo, so other customers can see for themselves.

I find them superior to "Chinese Character Flashcards 888" and wish I would have saved my money as I purchased both sets. There is another review comparing them that is incorrect. These flashcards are more sturdy, have a more detailed stroke order (they break down every single stroke while the 888 set often groups them), provide a sample sentence as well as additional words using the character (888 only has a few sample words), and provide the traditional character along with the simplified when applicable (888 does too, but it's very small). They are superior in every way to the 888 set- I haven't even looked at the other set since the Tuttle set arrived. In fact, this is the first Amazon review I've written, and I do so to correct the misinformation I based my purchasing decision upon.

Another useful feature is that the first 500 flashcards in the set coincide exactly with the two Tuttle Language Library volumes "250 Essential Chinese Characters". So, if you're working your way through these books, these flashcards are the ideal study aid. (The labeling numbers coincide exactly...if learning character number 115 in the book, you can refer to flashcard 115.)

I am very happy with the cards and encourage their use as part of a well-rounded study program. It has been commented that individual characters have no real "meaning", so these cards have limited use. I disagree. Individual characters do have meaning and are used to represent a particular sound and tone. You must learn what sound goes with which character since characters are written individually with equal spacing- when reading Chinese, you need to pronounce each sound as you go along since characters are not grouped together to signal they are being used to build a particular word. Thus, each character needs to be learned individually since it can be used with many different characters to build different words. For example, "pengyou", meaning "friend", is written with two characters: one representing the sound "peng" (which means friend) and one representing "you" (which also means friend). But the character for "you" can also be combined with the character for "yi" which result in "youyi", meaning "friendship".

As far as the samples sentences go, they may potentially be confusing since they do not provide an exact word-for-word translation, but for someone with moderate experience (I've been studying Mandarin for 3 months now) they are very easy to understand. An exact translation wouldn't be very comprehensible anyway. I rarely find myself confused over which word represents which meaning, and if uncertain, it's easy enough to look up a troublesome word in the dictionary. It's all part of the learning process.

Useful Tool for Memorizing Chinese Characters
Since I have both "Chinese in a Flash" and "Chinese Character Flashcards 888" flashcard sets, I wanted to offer a comparison between the two.

Flashcards 888 are organized in the order of frequency of use of characters; Chinese in a Flash are arranged in the order of frequency and complexity. Someone learning Chinese language is more likely to encounter characters in the order presented in Chinese in a Flash cards.

Flashcards 888 are of a sturdier quality than Chinese in a Flash cards.

Both are approximately the same size.

Both have radicals mentioned. On Flashcards 888, radicals are provided in the upper right corner on the front of the card; on Chinese in a Flash cards, beside the radical is also noted the name of the character as well as character components.

On Flashcards 888, you'll also find a stroke order, helpful to know when you practice writing characters; Chinese in a Flash cards, do not provide a stroke order.

Both sets also mention several character combinations, together with their pronounciation in pinyin and the meaning in English.

Chinese in a Flash also provide a sample sentence where the particular character / word is used; Flashcards 888 don't.

Flashcards come in one set of 888 cards; Chinese in Flash come in two sets of 448 cards.

I am very happy with both sets and enjoy using them both.

A nice set of Chinese character flash cards
This is a set of 448 flash cards for studying Chinese characters. Tuttle's set of Japanese character flash cards has been a favorite of Japanese learners, it looks like now they are trying to replicate the success for Chinese.

The order of characters does not seem to follow that of any popular textbook, but the included index will help in reordering them. I am using Practical Chinese Reader and the order of the cards was only slightly off.

The cards include both traditional and simplified versions and some compounds on one side, and meaning, radical and example sentences on the other. One drawback is the lack of stroke order information: Tuttle should have put the stroke order on one side of the cards, like they have with their Japanese cards. I really like these cards, but the lack of stroke order prevents me from giving 5 stars to this set.