250 Essential Chinese Characters for Everyday Use, Vol. 1

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:-)

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.

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.

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.

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.