Product DescriptionReading and Writing Chinese has been the standard text for foreign students and teachers of the Chinese Writing System since Tuttle first published it over 20 years ago. This new, completely revised edition offers students a more convenient, efficient, and up-to-date introduction to the writing system.
Customer Reviews
Average Rating:
Rating: - make your own flashcards
This has been a very handy book for me, I used it make my own character flash-cards, very affordable.
What I specifically like about this book is how all the characters are explained, so that you can see the logic in their structure and meaning, rather than just showing you what the sounds of the characters are.
I wouldn't call it a dictionary, but a tool for the learner to gradually learn and understand all the characters in the book.
Rating: - A valuable reference dictionary
Tuttle continues to provide thorough and easy-to-use reference materials that are useful for beginning learners of written Chinese. While online and electronic resources may be easier to search and use, McNaughton's Reading and Writing Chinese remains the authoritative reference book for learners of Chinese characters.
Nathan Dummitt
author of Chinese Through Tone & Color
Rating: - Errors everywhere
The majority of this book is a list of common characters and the elements that compose them. They may provide you with some compounds along with some characters, but there is no reading material.
Well, that's fine. One could use this book to learn characters. The reason for my 3 stars is that this book is filled with errors!
For example, they call this the Traditional Character Edition, but in at least one instance, , they give you the Simplified character and call it Traditional. ... Read More
Rating: - Excellent study tool
Favorite features:
- Shows "most likely" characters first so you learn what you need early on rather than esoteric ones you don't
- Shows simplified characters as well as traditional. It's not as hard or important to learn the radicals (and butchered etymology) for simplified characters as it is for traditional, so including smaller simplified characters where appropriate offers the best of both worlds. Better than buying the Simplified version w/tiny traditional characters & less explanation. ... Read More
Rating: - Questionable value
I relied upon this book a great deal when I first started studying Chinese characters, but looking back a year or so later there are two things which I find limit it's value:
1) The book only occasionally warns you when the character you're learning is no longer in use. Many extremely common characters are composed of other characters which are rarely if ever seen independently; while it may be useful to know the component characters for memorization purposes, it's also a bit frustrating to find out that ... Read More
- make your own flashcards
- Errors everywhere
