Tuttle Learning Chinese Characters: (HSK Levels 1 -3) A Revolutionary New Way to Learn and Remember the 800 Most Basic Chinese Characters 1st Edition, Kindle Edition

This book can help you on your way to learning Mandarin. If you work at it, you will be able to read and write the Chinese characters (hanzi) using this book. It's important to keep in mind that this book is not a complete recipe for learning the language but only a small part. For instance, millions of illiterate people can communicate effectively only by spoken word and yet reading/writing these characters remain beyond their ability.What I found most useful:* Provides a useful learning set and ordering of the thousands of characters in the language.* Helpful for identifying the various parts that make up some characters.Stroke orders are accurate and a must for learning to write the characters correctly* Pinyin text is accurate and helps you learn to pronounce the characters. Some of the characters have English 'sound words' to help you with the approximate pronunciation. Learning to speak pinyin correctly is a problem with all materials.* All HSK Level A characters are in one place.I am using this book as part of my study of learning Mandarin but here are some things I found to keep in mind or that are are not so helpful:* Doesn't teach grammar at all. This is to be expected as it is character-based and not sentence-based. If you only want to learn to recognize, understand basic meanings, pronounce and write Hanzi characters, this book will help you do that. If you want to become more fluent in conversing in Mandarin Chinese and reading and writing complete sentences then you'll have to go elsewhere.* Some of the character 'meanings' offered seem arbitrary and chosen to fit the 'story' as compared to the more common meanings found in other resources (books, official HSK A list, internet...)* Sound-words don't always help with the pinyin. A lot of the characters are DIY pronunciation anyway (have no sound words) and so offer no help at all. Perhaps it's just differences with dialects/regions, but the sound words chosen do not sound like real-world speakers. Having an audio companion to this book would be very helpful.* In my opinion, the character stories are of little value for recognition. With enough repetition, you will eventually recognize the character instantly (pinyin + meaning(s)) vs. remembering the 'story' can take a long time and clutter your mind with useless trivia.* Helps with speaking but listening is the other skill needed for communicating orally and that is not addressed - other than listening to yourself.* The HSK Level A words are not all single characters but most are 2 and some 3 and 4 characters. This books does not make it easy to learn these compound words. All the compound words are in there but it's not the most effective layout for learning them.* Using the book in 'flash-card' manner for learning new characters and testing yourself is difficult since you have to cover up various parts of the page. I have supplemented by using flash cards (purchased sets and missing ones printed on business cards).

Like another reviewer, I started out with James Heisig's "Remembering the Kanji". This book in and of itself was revolutionary. It taught characters in an evolving method, focusing on creating a story in your mind to help remember the characters. This approach was great, and I learned about 500 characters in that method.However, I began to realize that I wanted to learn Chinese instead of Japanese (the characters are fundamentally the same), and I also began to realize most of the characters in the first half of Heisig's book were not the most common characters - some were quite obscure - and may not even have the exact meaning of the keyword put forth. I commend James Heisig for pioneering that incredible method, but refinement was needed.Then I found this gem. "Learning Chinese Characters" combines everything you need to know to remember and pronounce the most common Chinese characters. It uses a combination of pictographic representations and plot nmemonics. It does cover pronunciation and tone fully, including them in the story.A basic character that cannot be dissected into any more parts is shown with a pictograph, simply so you can remember how character looks, which usually has something to do with the meaning (for example, the character for "eight" has an octopus drawn over it).More complex characters that are composed of other characters - the majority - are not represented by pictures, but instead by mnemonic stories, contrived using the elements that make up the character as actors (for example, an OCTOPUS ("eight") cutting a pizza with a KNIFE is the story for "division", which is composed of the elements for "eight" and "knife"). Pictures do indeed accompany these characters, but only to help you visualize the *story* (maybe it would show the octopus with a pizza cutter and a chef's hat). Most characters also include a secondary, related story to help you remember the pronunciation. In the end, you will know the pronunciation (including tone), the writing, and the meaning of every character in HSK A.I realize this might be confusing for someone that doesn't understand the Chinese writing system. If that is you, let me just say this: "it's easy!" Every character in HSK A is included, and even some other characters are included in a limited fashion in order to explain compounds including them. Most characters have:* A listing of the equation of elements (ie "eight+knife=division"), complete with cross-references to elements used and the page number on which they are more fully described.* A list of some words using this character.* A story to cement the meaning and pronunciation of the character in your mind.* A stroke-by-stroke guide.* Comments on the usage of the character.* The corresponding Traditional Chinese character (if the given character is Simplified) - the book is optimized for Simplified, but the Traditional character is always there if you'd like to learn them too. If you don't know what Simplified/Traditional is, you probably want to choose to study the Simplified characters (they are more common)... check out Wikipedia.* The radical of the character, which is commonly used for dictionary lookup.In my opinion, this method is best paired with using the Leitner system of flashcards (a quick Googling will find what I mean), so you can be sure you do really remember the characters.Simply, this is bar-none the best way to learn Chinese characters as a foreign adult - as long as you *concentrate on the story!* Don't just read without thinking. Everything you need to know about every character in the book is right there on the page, but you must concentrate. Etymology, the history of each character, might be a good tool to remember characters once you learn a lot of them, but this is by far the easiest, most painless way to learn the characters and *remember* them. One thing, however; it won't teach you grammar. You need to find another course to learn how to assemble characters into meaningful patterns. This book just teaches you how to write and remember those individual characters.On another note, I was in contact with the publisher and saw that they are not planning to publish a Volume 2 of this great book. This is sad news. This is a great format, and if you like it, I'd recommend emailing the publisher to let them know we want to see more like this!

I really like this book. It's my favourite of the mnemonic story based character learning books that I've looked at. I've found that most people who are negative about this book (and other similar books) simply don't understand the concept of mnemonics as a memory aid. They tend to criticize the stories for being stupid or not being based on real or historical information about the character. That is completely missing the point - mnemonics are there only to help you more easily remember the characters in the initial learning stages and they are *meant* to be ridiculous/stupid/bizarre as that makes them less forgettable. As this book explains, they are like scaffolding which "falls away" once the memory is reinforced strongly enough that you can recognize the character instantly. Mnemonics are a scientifically proven way to aid with learning and memory so don't dismiss it just because it seems silly at first.The stories in this book are short and simple but contain enough information to help you recognize and put together the individual components of a character in order to recall its meaning and its pronunciation. A lot of the stories (particularly earlier in the book) are accompanied by nicely illustrated drawings. This tails off as you progress through the book but that is deliberate - the idea is for you to come up with these drawings in your head which further reinforces the memory as you had to "work" for it.Be aware that the title is slightly misleading - there is no volume 2 as the "v. 1" in the title suggests. I've emailed the authors about this and they replied to say that this was a decision forced upon them by the publisher. When I was first choosing my books I was concerned about the fact that this book only covers 800 characters whilst other books (e.g. the Heisig books) cover 3000 or so. I'm less concerned now, as 800 characters is more than sufficient for you to grasp the concepts involved so that you can write your own stories/pictures for the rest of your learning, which as mentioned above is actually better for your memory than having it all handed to you. And you don't have the disadvantage of the Heisig books which lack pronunciations (a rather odd approach to language learning in my opinion).I recommend combining your studies with Reading & Writing Chinese: Third Edition by William McNaughton. This book gives you extra information for each character (including more "real-life" background information), and takes you beyond the first 800 in the Matthews book, so that you have a good basis for creating your own stories later. Because it is also in the Tuttle series the format and layout is similar which helps a lot when cross-referencing between them.An important caveat: be careful if you intend to start with this book and then switch to Heisig (or similar) for the remaining characters. Although there will be a decent amount of overlap, they won't always have chosen the same keyword for each character. Because the keywords are crucial for assembling the stories, you will struggle when switching from one system to another. It's still entirely possible, but you might have to re-learn some extra keywords for characters you already know.

My daughter and I are learning Mandarin at school. This book is great for learning characters by showing you how characters are made up of multiple characters and giving you ‘stories’ to help remember them.I use this in conjunction with Apps like Hello Chinese and the lessons at school. This is the best book I have found for learning Character formation.

Absolutely excellent book! I would highly recommend this to anyone wishing to learn to read chines characters. In two weeks I have learnt to recognise the meaning of, and to pronounce 60 characters by memory!!! This is by reading it for about 30-45mins every day. What's more, the book teaches the characters in the order of common usage, and the most fundamental characters first, so it is a logical building-up of knowledge. So I can already recognise quite a few characters when I look at Chinese texts!! The method used is absolutely genius. One doesn't try to memorise the characters, but instead learns the characters by memorising stories, just like reading a fiction book or watching a film. I have been using this method to learn other things too. Thank you, thank you, thank you to the authors!!!

The approach taken by "Learning Chinese Characters" is based on two concepts. First, and the most important thing to know when learning Hanzi, is that they are built up from components that are re-used from character to character. You will never get anywhere if you ignore this and try to learn characters as random series of squiggles. LCC introduces the components through little cartoons at the start of each chapter - I found I didn't really need these to remember them, but maybe some people will find them helpful.Second, and the core of the book's method, is an age-old trick for memorisation, namely building up strong visual stories around the things you want to remember. LCC meticulously presents systems for remembering how the components combine to form characters, the meaning of each character and its pronunciation, right down to special tricks for remembering non-English sounds. At first glance the stories for each character may seem a bit childish, full as they are of giants, fairies, teddies and dwarves, but in fact their memorable kookiness is one of the keys to the success of the method. So long as you take the small effort required to properly visualise each story, they really will help you remember.It is not a miracle method, and it is still hard work, but much easier than learning by rote. It took me over a year to get through the whole book, though that includes a couple of periods where I got bored and stopped for a while. If you're more committed than I was you should be able to get through the lot without too much strain in 3-6 months (5-10 characters per day is reasonable). The authors provide revision tests every so often during the book, but I would recommend backing it up with flashcard software (such as Anki) to keep on top of everything you've learnt.While neat and efficient, on its own "Learning Chinese Characters" is still a brute force method for learning characters and reading real texts alongside it will help a lot to cement characters in memory. That said it does exactly what it sets out to do, and in fine style. The only shame is that the authors have no plans to produce a follow-up.NB: LCC is based on the old HSK A character list, which does not map perfectly onto the new (1-6) lists. Nevertheless it remains a useful introduction to the HSK.

The book intends to provide another read into the technique introduced by James Heisig's books, however I personally find the stories with the teddy, dwarf, fairy and a giant to be way too absurd and irrelevant and the pronunciation part to be failing again. Positive side is the selection of characters and the phonetic groups.