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250 Essential Chinese Characters for Everyday Use, Vol. 1 | 
 enlarge | Author: Philip Yungkin Lee
Publisher: Charles E Tuttle Co
Category: Book
List Price: $24.95
Buy New: $11.95
You Save: $13.00 (52%)
New (30) Used (19) from $9.65
Rating:  16 reviews
Sales Rank: 293534
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 338
Shipping Weight (lbs): 2.3
Dimensions (in): 11 x 8.3 x 0.9
ISBN: 0804833591
Dewey Decimal Number: 495.182421
EAN: 9780804833592
ASIN: 0804833591
Publication Date: July 15, 2003
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Shipping: Expedited shipping available
Condition: BRAND NEW CRISP AND CLEAN COPY.
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Product Description
* Each character is shown in both simplified and traditional form, along with its pronunciation and meaning. Information is given about the radical (essential for finding it in a Chinese dictionary) and other components. The character configuration and stroke order are clearly shown, along with other tips to help form it correctly. A grid of practice squares for each character page allows the user to build confidence in writing Chinese. * Several compounds are also listed for each character. Each of these is likewise accompanied by its pronunciation, meaning and an example sentence (also transliterated and translated). These compounds and sentences build vocabulary and give extra practice in reading Chinese. All compounds are listed in an alphabetical index at the end of the book for ready reference. * Each set of 10 characters is followed by a quiz containing a variety of imaginative exercises to review and practice the recently learned characters. * Each set of 50 characters is followed by a "Character Building" section designed to build familiarity with identifying radicals within characters, a Review of vocabulary learned, and a Word Puzzle as an enjoyable way of revising the material covered to that point.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 11 more reviews...
250 Essential Chinese Charaters for Everyday Use Vol. 1 December 22, 2008
Philip Yungkin Lee has done an outstanding job of combining meaningful character contexts, exercises and review material. The book depicts both traditional Chinese characters and the simplified character set. If you have both the time and the patience, you can learn a multitude of essential characters and phrases. One thing I would suggest to Turtle Publishing, is to expand the Student's Guide section dealing with pinyin pronunciations on page xii; add pronunciations of multiple vowel combinations. Outside of this one recommendation, if you are planning a trip to China and truly want to learn how to both read and write "putonghau" Vol.1 and 2 are the books for you.
Writing Chinese characters is relaxing. October 30, 2008
NOTE: I bought Vol 1 and Vol 2 of these books. I am still on Vol 1 and this review is based on practicing 178 characters so far from Vol 1.
I wish my hearing was good enough to learn a second language but it isn't so the only thing I can do is learn about languages. One of my hobbies is learning other languages' sentence construction, use of phrases, alphabets, etc. Practicing writing Chinese characters and discovering how ideas are assembled with the characters is relaxing.
But I don't understand the order of characters in this book. Were they placed by amount of use or some other reason? I am up to 178 characters out of 250 in Vol 1 and I haven't understood any build up or building on past characters. Maybe I am learning something without realizing it but I wish some goal was more apparent to me.
Perhaps I lack patients as a high school graduate in China is expected to know about 10,000 characters so I have a very long way to go to even by a 1st grader:-)
 Rote Learning June 19, 2008
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.
 For the enthusiastic beginner December 25, 2007
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.
Buy it if you want to learn Mandarin characters May 13, 2007
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
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.
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