Reading & Writing Chinese: Simplified Character Edition

I've bought my chinese textbooks in my struggle to learn mandarin, and this has been the best one by far. By explaining the origin of the words, and linking the characters to images, it shapes a jumble of hieroglyphics into recognizable symbols, even mnemonics.

isbn-10:0-8048-3509-8


After studying pinyin during 1 yr, I badly needed an easy access to chinese characters and this book is the total solution.
I couldn't imagine a better help by the character study.

I really enjoy using this book. It is easy to find the characters. Each character has a brief description about its meaning, its ancien form, some examples of its use, and the most important: the stroke order.

This book is my second little helper, learning Mandarin now for more than two years in Holland, near Maastricht. In thousand characters you can immediately see the stroke order, you get information on etymology and look-alike-characters. I'm in love with this book. Strongly recommended for desperate Mandarin students.
laur crouzen

Take a look "inside the book" and you'll see the intention: a systematic approach to learning the characters you'll need for the HSK. I use it with a good dictionary (1982 Hanyu Cidian) to get all the meanings. Some very positive points for the learner:

1. Large, clear characters, with stroke order for the first 1000 or so
2. Introduces radicals as needed; these are the same 214 as the Hanyu Cidian
3. Shows traditional characters in parens, and if there are several traditional chars. combined into one simplified, shows which meaning goes where
4. Often has explanations of the "etymology" of the character
5. Excellent quality: thick paper, sturdy binding, attractive printing, large characters
6. Order of learning is fairly logical

What could be better:
1. Show the radical for each character; of course many are easy to figure out but others not!
2. Include another index by radical and stroke (like a dictionary)
3. Add some more explanations
4. In the case of multiple readings, be clear which are on the A, B, C, D or no list
5. Maybe separate multiple readings, as is done with zhe/zhuo/zhao

The same space is used for each character; I can see why but this gets very cramped later on with all the example words (ci); why not have variable-sized entries?

As others have said, it is not a dictionary, and should not be. Use it with a good dictionary.