Copybook of 7,000 Common Chinese Characters for Pen Calligraphy (Chinese Edition) Paperback – December 1, 1997

This is not a good book for a beginner to learn calligraphy and meaning, not that it claimed to be. It is a long list of words in Chinese with no translations. I'm sure it's thorough and great for other purposes.

The calligraphy is ok, but not very impressive.

difficult to put on the copy paper.

Love it. Best I've seen. No need for translations

Too small

The reason that this copybook has only characters and no translation is because it is a book for studying how these characters are written, how each strokes are traced, how much strength is emphasized at what part of the character, what angle does each stroke have, rather than a book for teaching Chinese. Mr. Gu is a very famous calligrapher in China who is specially famous for his Kai and Xing type of writing in hard pen calligraphy. Gu Zhongan and Tian Yingzhang are among the calligraphers whose characters copybooks are studied, followed and practiced by many calligraphy students who which to reach better hand writings in China. Chinese calligraphy involves a lot of looking at the copybook, thinking why and how each character can show the most of how it represent by elegantly writing it out, copying the characters to learn the figure and feeling it conveys, then thinking again, and followed by many practicing. I strongly recommend Gu's copybook because these 7000 commonly used characters will not only makes the student able to write them better in daily life, but also a thinking student will realize how to write similar characters in a more thoughtful way because there are way more than 7000 character in Chinese but the way of how to write them will eventually make more sense after practicing these basic and commonly used one.