Tuttle Learning Chinese Characters, Vol. 1: A Revolutionary New Way to Learn and Remember the 800 Most Basic Chinese Characters Review

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Tuttle Learning Chinese Characters, Vol. 1: A Revolutionary New Way to Learn and Remember the 800 Most Basic Chinese Characters ReviewI so wish I had had this book when starting to learn Chinese! While studying on my own, I was fascinated with Chinese characters, but I never managed to retain them. During an immersion course in Beijing, I learned to memorize Chinese characters by rote, just writing them over and over again - it worked for the 6 weeks I was there since I had classes every day and used the characters a lot. However, back home and only studying Chinese once a week or so, I quickly forgot all but the most common ones again.
Then I stumbled upon James Heisig and his method for learning Kanji (Chinese-derived characters used in Japanese). It was enlightening! I actually remembered the characters, and I can still remember them several years later! Unfortunately many characters in his book aren't really useful when learning Chinese, or they may even teach you incorrectly due to the meanings having changed over time. But I had learned what method would work for people with an analytical Western mindset like me, people who don't have a good memory for pictures and who hate the dull, time-consuming and ineffective Eastern method of writing characters over and over again.
From then on, I used a similar method to learn new Chinese characters I'd encounter or old ones that refused to stick. It was tedious though. My incomplete knowledge of Chinese characters wouldn't let me see the most useful order in which to learn characters and their parts; wouldn't let me distinguish between really useful ones and obsolete ones, and so on. I also had trouble memorizing the pronunciation and especially the tone with each character.
The sample of Heisig for Chinese was a disappointment, as it didn't tackle these problems. The characters introduced are mostly the same as in the Japanese version, never mind their usefulness (or lack thereof) in Chinese, the book doesn't even mention the pronunciation of a character and after the first few lessons you're left alone to invent stories and links.
When I got this book, "Learning Chinese Characters", I immediately knew that I had found the answer to all those years of searching. This book is everything I would have wished for as a beginning student of Chinese and more:
- explanation of how Chinese characters work and how to write them, plus stroke order diagrams with each character
- introducing basic elements through pictures
- introducing more complex elements through short and memorable stories that combine the basic elements, sometimes also accompanied by an illustrating picture
- stories also remind you of the pronunciation, including a special mnemonic for the tone
- teaches the 800 most basic Chinese characters, with a focus on the ones necessary for the HSK Level A exam, and there's a story or picture for *every single character*. It doesn't leave you alone after the first few steps.
- the most useful characters (e. g. the ones for "to be", "I", "you", "good", and so on) are actually taught in the first few lessons, even though these are hard to teach and some books avoid them on purpose. This will be extremely useful for students using this book alongside a beginner's Chinese course.
- also teaches words if they can be formed using only characters that were already taught
- based on simplified characters, as these are the most common ones today, but equivalent traditional characters are given in brackets if different
Great job, authors! I haven't yet found anything worth complaining about, so my rating is 5 stars!
(Note: while the usage of particles is briefly explained whenever they come up, this book is not suitable to teach you grammar or conversation and it doesn't try to be. Use a regular course for that instead, or Chinesepod. These won't help you learn characters though, so you do need this extra book. Learning characters and learning the language have to be separate tasks in Chinese, though you can do them at the same time.Tuttle Learning Chinese Characters, Vol. 1: A Revolutionary New Way to Learn and Remember the 800 Most Basic Chinese Characters Overview

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