Great guide for learning the characters!

”Regarding using a computer to look up characters, it's easy if you're reading text on the computer to begin with (as opposed to text on paper). You can use an application with a built-in dictionary, like for instance Wenlin.“

我用文林的时候，我有这个问题：我在下面我的screen. I read the definitions provided in English, without hardly looking at the character or trying to memorize it. It's a good way to work on deciphering the grammar and sentence structure, but it doesn't help me memorize characters. I love the Wenlin flashcard feature, except for the fact that it only offers one character at a time. Does anyone have a flashcard program that does whole words in a similar fashion?

huasen i wasnt dismissing the book cause of the internet... am just a poor student, so am trying to make use of resources that are freely available to me and others :) I have some great books, including a chinese measure word dictionary....fantastic! Just trying to make people aware of the resources that are at their fingertips

I'm on to the remaining characters section now.

Just read a bit more of this thread. Struck me that dismissing the book as a source of learning because you now have computers is a bit like having an amputation because there are now cars.

Have to agree with Bazza that knowing the individual components of a character makes it much easier to learn. Instead of seeing 15 strokes you see 3 component parts.

It has really speeded up my learning of characters and I guess I did get it from this book. I just wish the book was a bit bigger, giving it room to list the radical, the component parts (and their names) of each character as it comes up.

I have this book too and it does have good features. But it's far from the perfect character book, which I'm still searching for. Although it gives some quite detailed information about some characters others it is quite cryptic about, such as words to the effects of 'It isn't clear how this came to mean blah' or 'this is entirely random. Learn it.'. A fair number, including characters I know something about from other sources, it has nothing to say whatsoever. It also doesn't list the radical along with the character and sometimes fails to give the most common example of the character's usage.

I've heard that the book that www.zhongwen.com is based on is really good on the etymology but it's really difficult to get hold of and being Taiwanese doesn't deal with simplification.

Any non-native speakers?

Jenny probably does. ;)

Has anyone ever had any luck learning the meaning of every single individual character that they know, and currently has a "fluent" reading knowledge of Chinese?

I feel that an approach like this is possible, and probably quite thorough, but I just don't see the investment in time as being all that efficient. There are too many times when I've run into two characters, both of which I'm familiar with individually, but had no clue what their meaning together was.

Moreso, a lot of good approaches to language learning teach learning in context. I mean, in the real world, most things are in context, and fluency is all about being able to get the general meaning of a situation and be able to respond accordingly.

As I thought about it, another thing I do when I come across a character, alone or in a word, is lookup other words containing that character. I keep the few that have related meanings or characters I'm already familiar with, and that builds a little semantic cluster that seems to help me remember those characters. I certainly find such word association far more useful than character decomposition / etymology. Wenlin an invaluable tool for this

I couldn't agree more with Kyle

I learned my first 300 characters one-by-one, but once I got to the Intermediate level I just started cramming them in in pairs.

With Mandarin being a (for the most part) disyllabic language, it's not too common to read a paragraph in which most of the words are only one character. On the contrary, most will be 2 or 3 characters. Learning words / characters, then, in pairs speeds up the process.

There are still plenty of instances when I'll read two characters side-by-side, and I'll know what each character is, but not have a clue as to the meaning of the actual word. Learning characters / words in pairs, instead of individually, helps eliminate these types of encounters.

Bazza, you just pick up the book and lift a 1000 characters in between your hundred posts, as simple as that ?! Anyway I suggest you take a look at Nitrox's related post on stroke input with the Google Chinese IME.

I've now reached character 1000. :)

I probably don't actually know them all, but I have a much better understanding of the characters overall.

The best website, ever, is this:

www.zdic.net

The amount of info they hold is simply massive.

hey I was looking on the yellowbridge website that is mentioned in the comment above mine....it is fantastic (Thanks Nitrox)... Also found another really good dictionary thing... you can search for characters based on radicals or other parts of the character...you can do character "shape" searches... really handy... managed to find a character that I couldn't write properly for the other website with just a couple of clicks..

Keqing, that is an amazing website. I'll have to explore more. I am also following Bazza's lead. I am studying the characters with the book. I'm not progressing as quickly as he is, but it is interesting to know where the characters come from. I will try to find "Cracking Chinese Puzzles" and take a look. anything that can help me remember characters is worth a try. The "Modern Mandarin and Chinese Grammar" is not as user friendly as my grammar book, but good to have. I'll post the name of mine when I get back to Hong Kong, as I don't have it with me at the moment.

Following Bazza's progress on this thread I ordered the book myself and started studying some characters. I think the book is great. Does anybody know if there is any resource of flashcards corresponding to the zi in this book (in the same sequence order), like they have flashcards of different learning materials on this site:

http://www.yellowbridge.com/language/flashcards.html

?

I found something exciting the other day... no more paper dictionary for me! I lived in China last year and I had a little Nokia 2610 phone that had a dictionary so I could write chinese text messages to me friends and if they sent back something I didn't know I could look it up (this dictionary was different to any other I found cause it gave pinyin not just the character in the translation)...helped my characters sososo much... anyway I returned home to australia and my phone "went missing" ... but I just found... drum rolll please...

an online replacement!! It is an online dictionary where you can draw the character on the screen and it comes up with pinyin!

It doesn't seem particularly fussy about stroke order... I did some experimenting on characters I know... but it is a great resource.. the site also has other dictionaries that you can just insert characters or pinyin... so next time you hear a word (or in my case many words) you don't understand you can just put the pinyin in and then see what words come up.....

http://www.chinese-tools.com/tools/mouse.html

the whole website is great... put this and the all-star chinese pod together and you're off!

Before my brain just saw them as collection of meanless strokes, but now they actually make sense.

My reading skills have improved dramatically in just month of reading that book. :)

It's difficult to quantify my knowledge properly but I guess at the moment I know about Chinese 2,000 characters very well, that is, the pronunciation, the correct tone, the approximate meaning and I can reproduce the shape with a pencil and a blank sheet of paper. I know a further 1,000 or so from Japanese - in the context of Chinese this means being able to recognise the meaning and have an educated guess at the pronunciation. I am very optimistic about the 6,000 characters goal by year end although I had a very slow start - creating the database in my iFlash SRS took a long time and also working out the exact method for memorisation. I am using Google and the excellent zdic.net to look up the actual usage. And I don't use mnemonics in the sense of making up silly stories - too lazy for that...

Although initially sceptical about some characters on the bottom of the 6,000, I get an enormous boost of confidence from reading - not newspapers, surprisingly - but pulp fiction: characters for sounds (gasps, moans and exclamations) and characters for rare flowers, fish, etc. are in abundance.

One thing that I have found hugely useful is that this approach gives me a great base for knowing the right tones - I no longer have to recall 'the shape' of the words but am able to reconstruct it by breaking it down by character. (Obviously, exceptions and the zero tone are still learnt with each word.)

aeflow, I'm with you on this one. I find that I cannot memorize a character unless I know how to use it in a sentence. And it's far better if I can use it in two or three or four words/sentences.

furyougaijin,

Well that's a real tour de force if you can pull it off. You must be working very hard and have a steel-trap memory. Very impressive. How far have you gotten so far?

I wonder how we should define "knowing" a character. I don't consider I know a character unless I know the pronunciation (or one valid pronunciation), including the correct tone, and at least one word that uses that character.

I couldn't even try to bulk-memorize 6000 characters upfront, because many of the characters in the bottom couple of thousand would be things I might never encounter even once, even in a lifetime of reading newspapers and websites.

I think your approach may be more suited to your own unique abilities and goals. I'm not sure that the average learner of Chinese could be successful with this method, or would really need that many characters.

Mnemonics just don't work for me, memorizing elaborate stories seems like much more work that just wordlessly remembering the character. But I guess they work well for many of you.

There might be some value in repeating something that I posted on the forum nearly a year ago.

The greatest work designed for bulk-learning Chinese characters I have found so far is 'Cracking Chinese Puzzles' by T.K.Ann. It is not that common but is available in London and on Amazon. It contains 5 hard-back volumes and is quite pricy.

I am currently working my way through it and expect to be done by year end.

The beauty of the book is that it takes you from the absolute basics through systematic explanation of radicals to the full proficiency in both Traditional and Simplified to a grand total of about 6,000 characters, with plenty of examples from both modern and classic Chinese. Volume 1 treats around 1,850 characters and it is arranged not so much in the order of frequency as in the logical order of components. Hence, together with the obvious 我 and a rather frequent 餓, such obsure characters as 鵝, 娥, 蛾 and 峨 are also covered - and explained in such a way that definitions stick in one's memory.

Definitely not everyone's cup of tea, as it is a very very thorough book but I'm loving it.

Consider this excerpt:

(QUOTE)

'Or' is translated 或 huo4. 或 huo4 was the original character of 國 guo2 'country', 'state'. To circumscribe 或 with a large 口 was a later development. In its Metal Script the first stroke of the character 或 was cut in the middle. It therefore had 2 parts: the left part <..> had the connotation of 'boundaries of fields' and the right part 戈 'spear' or 'weapon'. Early people had nothing in writing to define ownership or boundaries. <..> A country could thus change its size depending upon its military power, and the drawing of boundaries became desireable. The character for country hence needed a circumscription, i.e. 口. In the meanwhile, the occurrence of boundary disputes conceived a lot of 'doubts'. Thus the central part 或 was made to mean 'perhaps'. The concept 'or' must have developed therefrom.

In later dynasties scholars thought it incorrect to leave a character signifying 'perhaps' in the centre of a character which meant prestigious 'state'. A new character 国 (FG: in the book without the dot) with 王 'king' in the centre was thus invented. The revolutionists eventually changed it to 国 by placing a piece of jade (FG: 玉) inside the circumscription - a very easy way out by just adding a dot. This is now accepted as the simplified form of 國. And 或 just means 'or' and nothing else.

(UNQUOTE)

And the book goes on to describe practically every character in a similar fashion. Although some explanations may be a bit corny, it does stick.

I'm up to character 780 now. :)

Rich,

I think a better solution would be to use flashcards, or rather flashcard software. Especially, software that incorporates spaced repetition (such as Mnemosyne or a number of others), so that characters you easily recognize are seen less often and characters you find troublesome are shown to you more often. This focuses only on the characters that are meaningful to you, rather than some arbitrary sequential list, and spaced repetition is especially helpful for attacking any problem areas.

Rather than a simple yes or no (remembered/didn't remember), spaced repetition asks you to evaluate how well you remembered an item (too easily; about right; with difficulty; almost remembered but got it wrong; totally forgot), so you click on a number from 1 to 5. It then uses that information to decide how many days before it shows you the item again.

Any confusion between 时 vs. 的 or 农 vs. 衣 will quickly get pinpointed that way.

One way to test your character writing skills is to listen to the Expansion sentences without reading the transcript first, and try to write them out (mentally or on paper). This is also "true" listening comprehension, since it's more of a challenge to understand a sentence if you don't already know the words that are going to be spoken. More like real life.

i do know some foreigners in China who have been there a while, but 的 is just as confusing to them, and it looks like 时 to them. Yet some of them are more likely to be able to memorize/identify 白, and if they can identify that, then they find it easier to pick out 的 in a name, phrase, or sentence. The points I make are all in talking about those who just can't get it because characters seem to look all alike, not those that our die-hards like us who can identify 的 时 and the like without a second though

How many of us learners, even those who are up to Intermediate on an oral level, can actually WRITE it on the spot without being able to see it? I am a pretty good Chinese writer from 5+ years at it, and I still think in terms of 白 and 勺 when writing 的 (and I find it more interesting when writing to do so) but still write it (that character, not all characters) as quickly as a Chinese person does.

I think it would be impossible to get nothing out of it. ;)

I've watched this discussion between Bazza and Aeflow with great interest since I'm making my initial substantive effort at learning characters. I can't decide, so I saved Aeflow's posted 4,000 most-used characters and will buy the book, then I'll feel out what works best for me. Great discussion that should help me a lot!

If breakdown 的 though you're also learning 白，勺 and also the wrap radical 勹. So you learning 4 characters instead of just one.

Surely you can learn to read and write 的 (the single most commonly-occurring character in Chinese text) quite easily without learning 白 and 勺 first. Then when it's time to learn the relatively rare 勺 (which ranks between 2600-2700th place in character frequency), you can just say "oh, that's just the right-hand side of 的", rather than learning them in the opposite order. And most people learn 国 before they learn 玉 etc.

It makes more sense to learn the most frequently-occurring characters first rather than the lowest-stroke-count characters. You notice the commonly recurring elements naturally as you progress, and if some of those elements happen to be standalone characters in their own right, you can learn them (and their pronunciations) at the appropriate time.

Bazza - Great analogy. I'm glad I found that book early on in my studies. Simply trying to memorize the characters was, and is, insane.

I now think that try to read characters without first learning the separate elements that make them up is like trying to read English words without first learning the alphabet.

wei1xiao4 - I couldn't agree with you more. The free-flowing stream of support and information on all fronts has always been a big selling point of this place. I'll be interested to hear what you have to say about the book. Keep us posted!

OK, I just got back to the States for vacation and waiting for me were "Reading and Writing Chinese" and Modern Mandarin Chinese Grammar" which you all have raved about. I'll let you know how they compare to the one's Ive been using. But think how great it is to have this community of people sharing this kind of information and the fact that I can feel confident enough in their opinions to act on them. I think that says a lot for the Chinesepod community. Thank you.

Thank you, I mistaked it with an textbook for an other learning course.

omg I hope u understand ^^

Anyhow, thank you XD

The traditional version is right here. What textbook are you referring to?

Can somebody give me the Amazon Link to the traditional Book and maybe for the textbook, too?

We can't have everything as a newbie, one step at a time. I would wish that too, but realize the resources are found as we grow in our search for understand Chinese.

I think the beauty of the book though is that it constantly reviews the earlier characters as you progress through. I'm trying my best to understand each character in turn and constantly flicking back to remind me of the radical meaning when it doesn't say.

I think this is definitely the quickest way to learn to read, I wish I had this book as a complete newbie.

It's hard to say really, I knew a lot of them already but they're more reinforced now. I'll probably need to refer back to it often though.

Bazza, if you're retaining all those characters as fast as you're reading them, you're my hero. :-)

500 down, 2500 to go. :)

About Piggy Bank :

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piggy_bank

Rich,

Suppose your friend tried to memorize "insurrection" the same way. inside + life + arising? It falls apart after a while.

That's a temporary memory trick useful for cramming specific vocabulary the night before an exam, and then the memory trick is promptly forgotten (and often the word along with it). It's a temporary scaffolding that can hold things in place for a while, but unless a permanent memory gets built in the meantime through encountering the word in multiple meaningful contexts, it will be lost.

Put it this way: suppose that eventually you stop studying Chinese for a year or two or longer (in real life, this happens more often than some of you younger folks realize, in your initial burst of enthusiasm for a new language). If all your knowledge of Chinese characters and words consisted of mnemonic tricks like this, which you had to constantly refresh through frequent review, but none of it ever got solidified or "internalized" by encountering words in realistic, interesting contexts, then after a couple of years away from it you would have forgotten everything. On the other hand, stuff that's internalized, stuff you just know without having to rely on any memory tricks, always remains below the surface and can be revived after a few weeks, even after a lapse of years.

But then if "Piggy Bank" is so easy, why do Chinese or other non-English speakers hardly remember words like that (maybe not that word, but others because they don't know the roots)? Yet I've been told if they do learn the meaning behind why we say "Piggy Bank" ("the word 'pygg' which referred to a type of orange clay. People made all kinds of useful objects out of this clay, including jars to hold money, which they called 'pygg banks'." Someone then decided to play off words and make a pig-shaped pygg bank, and the rest is history...).

Better example is how Chinese remember words, a good one being one a Chinese friend recently taught me: resurrection. "re" = again "sur" = life (surname, survive, etc.) "rection" = "the act of arising." Of course we never think that way, but learning another language helps to see the small parts, and that's how my friend remembered it. Sure, you can just memorize te stroke order as many Westerners who study Chinese do, but then they never see much meaning in that and makes it harder to memorize.

-Rich

KennyK,

Understanding the origins of characters is not necessary for learning Chinese. And much of it is obscure or unknown and shrouded in folk mythology rather than sound linguistics, and of limited value for mnemonics. Same goes for English or any other language: for instance, there's a fascinating story behind the origin of the term "piggy bank", but you don't need to know it in order to understand what the term means. It can be fun knowledge, but it's not really relevant to language learning. It's not really part of language learning at all, it's a separate subject.

Learning how to copy any character you see is not that hard. As MikeinEwshot pointed out, stroke order is pretty consistent, and after learning the first hundred or so characters anyone can understand the rules pretty well. In the infrequent cases where stroke order isn't obvious on inspection, you could consult an official reference (for instance, the official stroke order of 敝 was modified in 1997), or just write it in a plausible order and no one will mind.

You learn characters by encountering and learning words that use them, in interesting or mentally engaging contexts. I think that trying to systematically learn characters one by one in some prescribed order, in isolation and out of context, results in shallow memorization that doesn't stand the test of time. With books like that, sooner or later you hit a wall of page after page of characters you've never encountered before, far too many to rote-memorize.

Regarding using a computer to look up characters, it's easy if you're reading text on the computer to begin with (as opposed to text on paper). You can use an application with a built-in dictionary, like for instance Wenlin.

If you can read 3500 characters, you should be able to recognize pretty much every single character you ever see in the course of ordinary daily reading (newspapers, web pages, etc). Unless you're reading specialized or technical material, you should literally almost never encounter an unfamiliar character. At that level, you'd hardly need ChinesePod anymore. If reading newspaper articles, I think you could understand 90% or more of what you read with less than 2000 characters.

If you're focusing more on learning to speak and listen, but you want to slowly work on learning characters in the background, it's a good book to keep in the magazine rack in the bathroom. :)

@aeflow - and by the way... i have used this book... and i now usually understand about 90% of what i read in chinese... i'm not sure of exactly how many characters i can read, but it could possibly be over 3500

aeflow... people will always need to look up characters that they don't know... it's impossible to know all of them (even chinese people need to use dictionaries, just like english speakers need to use dictionaries now and then).... and what is wrong with using a book to better understand the origin of characters and learn how to write correctly? also, i'm curious, if you don't recognize a character, how are you using a computer to look it up?

Hello Bazza and other Chinese language fans / Chinesepod users,

My favorite for Chinese Characters for the past ...many years are the "Fun with Chinese Characters" vol. 1 to 3, from Tan Huay Peng, Federal Publications available from Amazon.com or from most bookstores in China and S'pore ... I just love the explanations and the drawings to get to know the "roots" of the characters ... + history + stroke order ...

Thanks to Chinesepod Team, and great to see so many learners of that beautiful language around ... Monique (now in Tunisia)

To get the most benefit from you need to go through it in order because it slowly builds characters together radical by radical. I'm already finding I can recognise characters much easier now, as I'm see the individual components rather than the character as a whole. I didn't know what most of the radical mean before either and I didn't that often elements of a characters suggest it's sound rather than it's meaning.

The stoke order illustrations are just a nice extra feature.

I am puzzled - what is so great about this book? Admitted I have the traditional character version, but surely it just presents a lot of characters out of context. Once you are passed the beginners stage, and have mastered stroke order (not very testing), the stroke order stuff is of little value. In terms of looking up characters, use a PDA and plecodict - I agree with Aeflow - life is too short

I found this book is widely available in almost any bookstore, and that many of my classmates had the same book when I began madarin classes a little over a year ago. I agree it's a very useful book, and I haven't ventured for another because it was easy to use. I imagine there are other books which use a similar approach, but the fact that so many people seem to have this one also makes it nice to pair up with other learners around this common resource.

The simplified version also shows the traditional equivalents.

I'm up to character 412 now, not bad for a weeks work. :)

I hate to hijack this thread, but...

It's good that you have the sheer stick-with-it attitude and perseverance required to flip flip flip flip flip through paper dictionaries. Back in the stone age, that's how it was done, when men were men and dinosaurs were dinosaurs. Of course back then, hardly anyone actually succeeded in really truly learning Chinese.

Having that sort of perseverance will serve you well, you'll need it. If applied well, you'll achieve a lot. What a shame to waste an aptitude like that unproductively though.

Look at johnb. He's a big advocate of sheer perseverance as the route to success, he even mentions this in a quotation at the top of his blog http://notes.biesnecker.com/ He mentioned that by his own count he's learned 3500 characters. Can you possibly get to that point using your current approach?

"...spend 2 hours deciphering 30 characters..."

I'm experiencing physical pain reading this.

Barry,

You do have options. Get a laptop. Or a PDA and PlecoDict. Get a spaced recognition flashcard program like Mnemosyne if you want to work on character recognition. You're wasting your life away. I'm serious.

Yes, I am using a paper dictionary. It is laborious but I do most of my studying away from the computer so I don't have any options. I find doing it this way imprints it into my memory better than using some computer program which does the work for you and, to me, doesn't facilitate character recognition.

Barry,

With modern computer tools, you should absolutely not need to care what the radical is for any character.

The only reason to care about radicals and stroke counts would be if you were looking things up in a paper dictionary. If you're doing that, for the love of God, stop.

One thing I've discovered immediately is how easy it is to find characters. I usually spend AGES trying to work out what the radical is, which is very discouraging when you spend 2 hours deciphering 30 characters or so, but with this book you can just count the strokes for the entire character and look it up much more quickly. That in itself is an enormous benefit.

I'm off on holiday next week to the Lake District and will not have access to a computer, but I'll be taking my iPod chocked full of Cpod lessons and this book. So if this crappy English weather continues as it has been for the past two months or so and makes the mountains inaccessible, I'll still have plenty to keep me busy. (Note to self: most revisit the Cpod lessons on visiting the pub...)

wongfeihung, I have the Traditional version as well, and another bonus there is that in the lower right hand corner of each entry, it will show you the Simplified character as well. You do miss out on the stroke order and whatnot, but it's still a fantastic book.

Yeah I got this book, though in the Traditional edition - it's the best!

I do say that I'd recommend the traditional characters for a couple reasons - first, as the book states in the beginning, if you only learn the simplified you are missing out on a big part of history and culture, as there are a lot of old books written only in Traditional characters. Also, the traditional version gives good mneumonics and other hints to help you learn the characters and understand them better. Not only will it tell you the components of each character, but why (sound-sound, sound-meaning, etc.) and the best way to memorize them....

John, I think my attraction to this book is that seems to be idiot-proof (and that's a subject I know something about!). You're probably right in that it isn't radically different (pardon the pun) from any other guide. It's just the first one that I came across that didn't over-complicate the subject, and presented it in a way that didn't immediately discourage me.

I don't get it... I've used quite a few different character books in my day (Chinese, Japanese), and they all seem very similar. Most of them give a standard offering of radicals, stroke counts, the character in different fonts, etymology, usages, etc. What makes this book so special? I remember that when I was forst learning Japanese I had a favorite Chinese character book (maybe it was this one?), but I wonder how much of that was that the book was excellent, and how much of it was just picking a book I liked and sticking with it.

I too think it is more important for EVERY Chinese learner to know the ins-and-outs of Chinese characters. That is why I enjoy doing the character breakdowns that I'd like to do more, and Bazza has his juice flowing in the right direction on how I think it should be done (see his comment in the Dog lesson on 乖)

To me characters dance and tell stories, even the simplified characters. When I started learning Chinese, I first used the website http://www.zhongwen.com (which is where I still get my website's charater of the day image, and sometimes join the pinyin chat). Then I tried my friend's Wenlin software, and while that did a nice job giving some different explanations of why the characters are the way they are, and showing characters/words with the same radicals/characters, I do NOT recommend it as a dictionary, especially English to Chinese (only one-word phrases, where my cell phone's free dictionary does full proverbs in both directions).

Once I get myself into the teaching world of Chinese, hopefully at ChinesePod or the like, it would be dealing with characters and grammar, more visual aids. So, I do like this topic! I do hope I can offer more and learn more in this area even now. 加油！

I know that ChinesePod's primary goal here is to teach people spoken Mandarin, but given that all of the dialogue and expansion areas are delivered in characters, I'd love to see them break down the characters a little more for us. If THIS BOOK could be delivered through the Web 2.0 interface, I think this would make ChinesePod an unstoppable juggernaut. Right now, as fantastic as it is (and it's the best game going), you still need to leave this site to continue your learning. There's an opportunity to be capitalized on here!

I think everyone should own this book, maybe ChinesePod could arrange some kind of discount. ;)

The orange one is the one I swear by. Let me know what you think of this thing, Barry. Bazza gives a good example above of how this book presents this information.

Mine came yesterday. 2005 edition - orange. Too early to form an opinion on it.

KennyK:

Is the traditional book the one from 1998?

Is there a new one?

Which color?

It does make them a lot easier to remember if you can break them down. One character I just looked up 坐 meaning to sit，it says a picture of two people sitting on the earth. 人 is person, 土 is earth or soil. :) To break it down further you can also think of 土 as a cross stuck in the ground.

Rich if you go to the Amazon link at the top, and click on "look inside" it's shows some of the pages.

300 now hehe. :) Will probably have to review them all again after, most of them are already fairly familiar but I'm learning loads about them and seeing all sorts of connections between characters I never realised before.

Wow, sounds cool. Hanzi is my biggest interest in Chinese, to the point that my Chinese teachers were recommending that I learn Tang Dynasty poems since most words from that time were just one character, and a lot of modern words use those characters, but not the single character as a word (like 望 in 希望 or 盼望)

Will have to get ahold of the book. Is it sold in local book stores like B&N? Would like to just glance it over first.

And Bazza, 加油！

Jia1you2, Bazza, Jiayou2 !

Up to character 264 now. :)

:))

I wouldn't mind one of these www.bookholder.com so I can reading laying down. :)

Umbrella - You can find the book on Amazon, for one. There's a link waaaaaay up at the top there. :-) (And thank you for the lovely compliment. That's just about the sweetest thing ever. Haha.)

Bazza - I KNOW. Dude, I love how that book just builds on itself, and how you'll make associations based on previous acquisitions. The little mnemonic devices in there are just brilliant. You're absorbing the book a lot faster than I have, but I keep mine in the, uh, "reading room" and absorb a little bit at a time.

I've read up about character 110 now, I'm starting to see them in a whole new light now. :)

I wish I had this book a year ago, I've already learnt a lot in first few pages.

by the way, Frank, may I say this, your face looks gentle just like priest...:)

wow, do you know where we can find this ebook ?

I wonder if we could get them to add an "Endorsed by Bazza" sticker on the front cover. :-D

My book arrived today. I did get the orange one.

It's an awesome book. :)

My order was actually dispatched on Friday, so I should get it Monday or Tuesday now. :)

KennyK, I have a red version, too, but it's for the Traditional characters, not the Simplified. Make sure you got the right one!

My order says: Delivery estimate: 19 Jul 2007 - 24 Jul 2007

So looks like I'm not going to get it quickly anyway. Probably because I chose the free delivery option.

bazza, i never saw "bilingual edition" before... are you sure that's the same book? well, maybe because it's an older edition ("revised third edition")... in any case, the version i got is red ;)

I think more important than the price is what's the difference between the editions. The US one says "Bilingual edition (July 15, 2005)" and the UK one says "3rd Ed., Simplified Character Ed edition (31 Oct 2003)". For the description on the US one it says "revised third edition" though, so it's not the 4th edition. The UK one also says revised though.

I think I'll just get the UK one.

you know that things go wrong easyle if you try to hard and to quick duibudui? ;-)

I'm impatient and want things quickly. ;)

what´s a week if you have a live study it ;-) ( 9 comment´s to go and I´m climbing up the post score to actual most posting user /posted user (not posing user I hope ;-) ) )

Will probably take a week longer to be delivered though.

I expect you've noticed Bazza but buying it from Amazon US with UK shipping would work out cheaper, I think, for us at the moment - $25.45 over £18.74 (inc P&P). Crazy!

Thanks for the recommendation, Frank!

Looks to be an earlier edition actually.

The UK version appears to be green. ;)

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Reading-Writing-Chinese-Simplified-Character/dp/0804835098/ref=pd_bbs_1/104-4956157-6148719?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1184121092&sr=8-1

haha... this is the book i use (although i use the traditional one)!!! i have used it while in Taiwan and found it to be an invaluable resource.

1. I like how it builds on itself... for example, first you learn the characters for woman (女), then child (子), and then you learn good (好), which is a combination of the two.

2. It also provides a great way to look up characters that you don't know by using stroke count or pinyin.

3. In my version (traditional characters), it also provides the simplified version, if different.

4. For each entry, it also gives a few examples of words using that particular character.

5. The origin of many of the characters are clearly explained

As a side note, I also used the Japanese version a few years back for learning "kanji" and found it to be equally worthwile. :)

I have this book as well, he's right ABSOLUTELY THE BEST! 絕對是最好的！