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Fundamentals of Chinese Characters
£27.60
Fundamentals of Chinese Characters focuses on the connections between the shapes and meanings of basic Chinese characters, enabling students to learn to recognize and write Chinese characters before they learn to speak Chinese. Presenting fundamental knowledge of Chinese characters according to their intrinsic regularity rather than in the sequence often used in teaching spoken Chinese, this book enables teachers to offer students a course on Chinese characters alongside a Chinese language course at the elementary level. With interactive exercises, rhymes for all the characters covered in the book, and illustrations for all the basic characters, this book makes learning Chinese characters easy and fun.
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Additional information
| Publisher | Illustrated edition (16 Jun. 2006), Yale University Press |
|---|---|
| Language | English |
| Paperback | 401 pages |
| ISBN-10 | 027474368X |
| ISBN-13 | 978-0274743681 |
| Dimensions | 27.84 x 21.64 x 2.59 cm |
by weareus
This is a superb book. I never thought I would ever be able to understand Chinese characters, but this book has inspired me to learn and I am
working through it bit by bit. I love writing the characters. Does anyone know if there is a CD to accompany this book? I would like to practice the pronunciations with the character verses. The book instructs you to ‘listen and read’, but my book did not arrive with a CD included. I don’t know if it was mistakenly left out by the seller or whether the book assumes you are working with a teacher to teach you the pronunciations.
by Concerned critic
This book is not the best thing since sliced bread, it is better than sliced bread!
I myself have agonised over the best order in which to present chinese characters to students (namely myself!). Many frequently-used characters are complex to read and write, so the common approach – just getting students to learn to read and write the characters they are learning to speak – is deeply unhelpful.
The book starts with a helpful history of the evolution of characters. (It concentrates throughout on mainland simplified characters, but also presents the complex forms still used in many places outside the mainland.) It then goes on to give a presentation of the usual analysis of characters into pictographic, picto-phonetic, etc. groups. Next presents an overview of the calligraphic strokes used in constructing chinese characters. Then presents chinese numbers, showing clearly the strokes required to form them. This is the perfect lead-in, as these are mostly very simple characters indeed. There are exercises which give lots of opportunity for repetition. Because of this, the book is even more helpful in the initial stages of learning characters than William McNaughton’s Reading & writing chinese characters, my previous favourite.
Other chapters present pictographic characters from nature and the human body, then move on to other categories of characters.
Overall, it is my opinion that this is the very best introduction to chinese characters that I have seen. I would encourage the author to apply his talents to the characters in the various levels of the chinese language proficiency test. Obviously a different approach will be required than in this volume, needing some input from a McNaughton-esque approach. But I believe the author could provide a valuable text.
by Warren Robert Parkinson
But so far i am very impressed with the ammount of detail put into the book. This history of chinese characters really does help ones understanding of how and why chinese is written the way it is. An essential introductory book to the language, not limited only to writing, but to pronouciation and grammar aswell. Look out for the sequel, i think its called advanced chinese or something similar.