250 Essential Chinese Characters for Everyday Use, Vol. 1

List Price: $24.95 Discount Price: $12.76

Customer Reviews:

Get the flash cards instead [Posted on 2007-03-08]
My only issue with this book is that it is almost completely redundant with the flash cards (Chinese In A Flash) offered by the same author and publisher. I have found the flash cards to be a much more effective way to learn Chinese characters, and so am disappointed about having also purchased the book. Although the book does sometimes include a sentence or two about a character's origin, which could in principle be useful for remembering that character, these sentences usually refer to the traditional character rather than the simplified one, and are usually too brief and simplistic to be of much use anyway. So my advice would be to buy the flashcards instead of the book - they contain the identical information, but in a more compact, easy-to-use format.

Excellent [Posted on 2007-05-13]
This book is absolutely one of the two keys to learning Mandarin. (The other is the Pimsleur programs.) I never thought I'd learn this challenging language, even though I'm conversant in three LOTE already; but this book is helping me learn how to write in Mandarin. It also has each new character or word in various contexts to show shades of meaning, which is really important in a tonal language.

I highly recommend this and its companion volume, 1, along with the Pimsleur program, which I'm sure you can get on Amazon.

Buy it if you want to learn Mandarin characters [Posted on 2007-05-13]
This book will give you a very good start to character literacy. It should be used in conjunction with a program that gives you practice in pronunciation. (I've not found one shoe that fits all.) I'd recommend buying this book and v.2 along with the separately published Pimsleur CD's.

For the enthusiastic beginner [Posted on 2007-12-25]
This is a great starter to transition into reading and writing Chinese. Not only does it provide character descriptions with example sentences with pinyin (phonetic) accompaniment, there are exercises throughout to test learning and to help review later on. I definitely look forward to using this book to jump start my Chinese reading and writing.

I wouldn't refer the learner of Japanese to this book, for the fact, Japanese rarely use the simplified characters in everyday writing.

Rote Learning [Posted on 2008-06-19]
I bought volume 1 and 2 of this book when I first started learning characters and found that it just didn't work very well for me.

What I didn't like about this book:

1) It introduces characters strictly by frequency. In many cases the more complex characters are introduced without teaching the meanings of the simpler character components.
2) For characters with different simplified/traditional forms, memory hints are geared towards traditional characters with the occasional negative comments regarding the changes done in the simplification process.
3) The character compounds that are introduced with each character are often combined with characters that have not been learned yet.

What I did like about this book is:

1) The character writing/review sections
2) The large stroke order diagrams

That being said, I found that, personally, my retention using this system was poor. I stopped using it completely once I discovered Tuttle Learning Chinese Characters Volume 1: A Revolutionary New Way to Learn and Remember the 800 Most Basic Chinese Characters, also printed by Tuttle.

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