With Reading & Writing Chinese, you can start
learning Chinese characters on your first day of study. In time, you will
start to recognize a few characters on signs and better appreciation this complex and fascinating foreign written language. This book is appropriate for beginning Chinese students and will still be useful as students reach an intermediate to advanced level. The book has a study guide which explains the basics of Chinese characters and a reference section with several thousand basic characters – both these sections are valuable for beginners wanting to practice writing. Learners can buy notebooks for Chinese characters or graph paper. (Write one character in four squares.) The entry for each character contains the stroke order, and the pinyin (pronunciation). Most entries also contain a brief description of the character and some examples. This book is excellent for
learning the correct stroke order – which is essential both to write properly and for later when the student wants to look up characters since some dictionaries order characters according to stroke order. The student will eventually get a feel for the correct stroke order – even when presented with new characters. While traditional characters (used in Taiwan and many overseas Chinese communities) are used in the book,
simplified characters (used in Mainland China) are included as a footnote for applicable characters. However, you cannot use the index to look up simplified characters, which is frustrating if you are trying to decipher text written in simplified characters. The book doesn’t have many mnemonic devices, which would be helpful for approaching such a rich language. Nor, does it go into detail on the origin or evolution of the characters. It does provide an excellent overview of written Chinese and it serves as a good reference for someone who needs to look up the occasional character.