TUTTLE LEARNING CHINESE CHARAC

For any Chinese learner this is a great book to understand the characters as well as the story behind them. Helps memories with ease.if read in order first few chapters cover all characters from HSK1 to HSK3

Great for people wishing to write and read Mandarin as a foriegn language. Easy to understand pictures and relatable .

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.

A really good book, but spoilt by the ridiculous stories for each character.