Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #32530 in Books
• Published on: 2003-10-31
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 336 pages

Synopsis
This is a completely revised and updated new edition of Tuttle's classic Reading & Writing Chinese. This edition focuses on the simplified characters now universally used in mainland China and Singapore, and which are the primary goal of almost all learners. The traditional characters still used in Taiwan and Hong Kong, and in older literature, are also included in order to furnish a complete reference.

Customer Reviews

Organic Learning: Five a-day.
This lovely book lists a couple of thousand characters, but unlike its sibling (which concentrates on traditional forms) the emphasis is on those simplified variants promulgated by the Chinese government to promote literacy at least from the 1950s. These shortened characters were subsequently adopted by Malaysia and Singapore in the 1980s.
Each page holds a few 'letters' which are individually presented according to how they should be written. This is definitely not a workbook though. Sizing of the graphic is no problem and confusion is avoided by the use of block illustrations,ie. cursive strokes which you'd get with native or highly-adept speakers and writers of Chinese are a no-no.
Variant meanings come under the relevant character and the Pinyin index affords a quick lookup - making this good value book also useful as a beginning Chinese-English dictionary. In the main trunk of this physically lightweight tome - and within each character's allocated space - there's an illustration of the traditional version should this be different.
What's probably most important for the new learner is that with the index she'll be able to learn the writing simultaneous to any class she's attending, which will probably most likely just concentrate on the Pinyin transcription regardless of the (few) number of charcters introduced. If you're already familiar with some of the rules regarding stroke order, and are torn between this simplified version and the other traditional volume, I'd personally recommend that you obtain the latter since I've never had any problem with learning how to write simplified Chinese after I've studied the traditional forms. The former are in many cases just truncated versions of the older, literary characters.

Good Book! But Very Bad layout - I Agree with the previous reviewer
This book has loads of radicals & frequently used chinese characters but i really do agree with the previous reviewer it has a very bad layout.
You'd expect all the 'numbers' to be together in the book 1,2,3,etc.
It is in actual fact: 1, left, woman, person, 2, 3, 10, borders, surround, field.
So, i went through the book getting numbers 1-10,found the words for thousand/hundred/million etc... Now, having grouped them all together - along with the characters I can do my numbers in chinese now - this would've been much easier had they been grouped together in the first place. My advice would be to get this book but also get WRITE CHINESE WITH BETTY (Betty Hung) I listened to another reviewer who recommended it if you're trying to learn how to write Chinese - It is a brilliant book i also highly recommend it.
Back to 'Reading & Writing Chinese' - it is loaded with 1000s of characters so i'd recommend it but don't put you're hopes too much on it. It's not grouped together in any paticular way eg. all the characters that have this radical, all with this radical, all the numbers, all that have 3strokes, all that have 4,5,6,7 etc...
NOT LIKE THAT AT ALL !They are just plonked wherever. It gets really annoying when looking for some characters. Reading & Writing Chinese with Betty you should definitely buy if learning chinese its helped me with my reading alot. This book although the character you're looking for you'd probably find you'd have to search the whole book for it !
I'd say that its a good thing to have on standby to find some characters but buy a Chinese Dictionary as well because, in my opinion, this book is poorly designed and badly laid out.

Annoying structure
Although this book is quite comprehensive with around 3000 characters (of which 1000 are presented in detail), the order in which they are presented seems almost random with common and uncommon characters and radicals all mixed togethor in no apparant sequence. Something I find a bit annoying.