Product Description

Aimed at helping students of Chinese learn and remember Chinese characters—including the pronunciation of characters—fast and effectively, Learning Chinese Characters Volume 1 is a systematic study aid to this difficult language.
Designed specifically to ease students into the daunting process of learning Chinese characters, Learning Chinese Characters Volume 1 incorporates the key principle of visual imagery. A book for serious learners of Chinese, it can be used alongside (or after, or even before) a course in the Chinese language. Concise, clear and appealing, this practical guide is well designed and includes an easy-to-use index.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #9311 in Books
• Published on: 2007-08-15
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 384 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9780804838160
• 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
Alison Matthews is a statistician who has worked in the oil, aviation, tourism, medical and software industries.

Laurence Matthews is the author of the Kanji Fast Finder and Chinese Character Fast Finder books.

Customer Reviews

The Ultimate Course in Chinese Characters!
I so wish I had had this book when starting to learn Chinese! While studying on my own, I was fascinated with Chinese characters, but I never managed to retain them. During an immersion course in Beijing, I learned to memorize Chinese characters by rote, just writing them over and over again - it worked for the 6 weeks I was there since I had classes every day and used the characters a lot. However, back home and only studying Chinese once a week or so, I quickly forgot all but the most common ones again.

Then I stumbled upon James Heisig and his method for learning Kanji (Chinese-derived characters used in Japanese). It was enlightening! I actually remembered the characters, and I can still remember them several years later! Unfortunately many characters in his book aren't really useful when learning Chinese, or they may even teach you incorrectly due to the meanings having changed over time. But I had learned what method would work for people with an analytical Western mindset like me, people who don't have a good memory for pictures and who hate the dull, time-consuming and ineffective Eastern method of writing characters over and over again.

From then on, I used a similar method to learn new Chinese characters I'd encounter or old ones that refused to stick. It was tedious though. My incomplete knowledge of Chinese characters wouldn't let me see the most useful order in which to learn characters and their parts; wouldn't let me distinguish between really useful ones and obsolete ones, and so on. I also had trouble memorizing the pronunciation and especially the tone with each character.

The sample of Heisig for Chinese was a disappointment, as it didn't tackle these problems. The characters introduced are mostly the same as in the Japanese version, never mind their usefulness (or lack thereof) in Chinese, the book doesn't even mention the pronunciation of a character and after the first few lessons you're left alone to invent stories and links.

When I got this book, "Learning Chinese Characters", I immediately knew that I had found the answer to all those years of searching. This book is everything I would have wished for as a beginning student of Chinese and more:
- explanation of how Chinese characters work and how to write them, plus stroke order diagrams with each character
- introducing basic elements through pictures
- introducing more complex elements through short and memorable stories that combine the basic elements, sometimes also accompanied by an illustrating picture
- stories also remind you of the pronunciation, including a special mnemonic for the tone
- teaches the 800 most basic Chinese characters, with a focus on the ones necessary for the HSK Level A exam, and there's a story or picture for *every single character*. It doesn't leave you alone after the first few steps.
- the most useful characters (e. g. the ones for "to be", "I", "you", "good", and so on) are actually taught in the first few lessons, even though these are hard to teach and some books avoid them on purpose. This will be extremely useful for students using this book alongside a beginner's Chinese course.
- also teaches words if they can be formed using only characters that were already taught
- based on simplified characters, as these are the most common ones today, but equivalent traditional characters are given in brackets if different

Great job, authors! I haven't yet found anything worth complaining about, so my rating is 5 stars!

(Note: while the usage of particles is briefly explained whenever they come up, this book is not suitable to teach you grammar or conversation and it doesn't try to be. Use a regular course for that instead, or Chinesepod. These won't help you learn characters though, so you do need this extra book. Learning characters and learning the language have to be separate tasks in Chinese, though you can do them at the same time.

Better than Heisig
I have been working my way through this book and it does appear to result in better retention than other Chinese character books. It also covers a reasonable number of characters (800), which is not too many to cover but which provides at least the capability to read simple texts. Presumably the authors will follow up with further volumes, or one could use their Chinese Character Fast Finder using the same method.

heisig and Richardson's book is yet to be announced (and it is not in Amazon yet) but they have made an exerpt available with the first 90 or so characters. Based on this, I would recommend the Matthews book for several reasons: available now, covers pronunciation as well as meaning, also covers vocabulary, stories easier to remember, and stories for all characters.

Author please note: the pronunciation for character 121 is evidently wrong; 511: 'baseball' not 'several'.

Finally! A system that works!
This is the most effective system for learning Chinese characters that I have found.

Why I recommend this book:

1) Fully developed system for learning simplified characters

Unlike other character learning books which try to shoe-horn the simplified characters into the semantics of the traditional ones, the memorization system in this book is rooted entirely in the simplified characters. I consider this a plus because I WANT to learn simplified characters.

2) Very high retention of characters using the method in this book

I must admit that when I first flipped through the book and saw the stories for each character I thought that memorizing a story for a character is more effort than simply memorizing the character...

Now that I have been using this study method for a while, I have seen huge gains in character retention (compared to 'rote learning' or 'equation' methods I've tried in the past). Now when I see a complex character that I have not studied for a while, I can easily use this book's method to break it down into it's components. The story then pops back into my mind, and I've successfully recalled the meaning, tone, and pronunciation of the character.

3) Easy to review

The table of contents are laid out in such a way that they can be used to easily review all characters learned so far. There are also many 'review boxes' as you progress through the book to help reinforce previously learned characters.

4) Basic radicals are illustrated to help you visualize them

5) Introduces characters based on frequency AND builds-up on previously learned radicals/characters

Most character books that order characters by frequency-of-use neglect to introduce the character's components first, making the learning process more difficult than it needs to be. This book makes sure to introduce all basic characters as they're needed AND introduce the characters based on the frequency-of-use.

6) Introduces compounds which only use characters learned up to that point

This allows you to start rapidly building up vocabulary using the characters you know. This also helps helps reinforce the characters.

7) Includes ALL HSK Level A characters and compounds as well as additional useful character compounds.

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Things that could be improved:

1) Some of the basic radical/characters do not have illustrations or suggestions to help memorize their shape. In these cases I dig up my set of Fun with Chinese Characters 1 (Straits Times Collection Vol. 1), Fun with Chinese Characters 2 (Straits Times Collection Vol. 2), and Fun with Chinese Characters 3 (Straits Times Collection Vol. 3) to fill in the gaps. Overall, only a small percentage of the radicals fall into this category.

2) A review list for the introduced character compounds.

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I recommend using complementing this book with Tuttle Learner's Chinese English Dictionary which provides sample sentences and usage information for all HSK and most additional characters and compound introduced in this book.

Eagerly awaiting Volume 2!