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[chaz47]

i'm looking for a good smallish book of Mandarin characters... i realize that this may be a tall order for a single volume as there are so many characters, but i thought this might be a good way to start learning Mandarin... small book carry it always and flip through when time is available...

what works/worked for you guys?

something of a similar size to the Lonely Planet phrasebook series would be ideal... with stroke order of course...

[NorbertRadd]

Xinhua book store has a dictionary for 10 RMB.
It takes effort and time to learn characters and there are many other better books out there. This topic's been tossed around the forum quite a bit. Good luck.

[laska]

"Reading and Writing Chinese" is used by a lot of students. It used to be published by Charles E. Tuttle Company, but now may have switched publishers. Last time I saw it in the bookstore, there was a simplified character version and a complex character version. The book contains 2000 characters selected by frequency. The first 1000 characters have stroke order information. After learning 1000, you probably don't need the stroke order any more.

Though they are selected by frequency, the characters are grouped together as they might appear in your spoken Chinese textbook, i.e. gao is put together with su, which forms the word gaosu and ren is put together with shi, which forms the word renshi. (You should start trying to learn some words from the very beginning--the characters are just like the alphabet. Without words, however, you can't read. Write words on the back of your flashcards.) Also, simple characters are presented first and more complex characters later on. This is a very good scheme for organizing the characters.

I recommend the complex character version because it also contains the simplified characters. You can always learn the simplified characters, but if you live in the Mainland your only opportunity to get a foundation in complex characters, and therefore classic Chinese etymology, is by learning the complex characters first, even if you just learn to recognize them.

"Reading and Writing Chinese" is available in China at major foreign language bookstores.

Also indispensable is Chinese Characters, A Genealogy and Dictionary by Rick Harbaugh. It's available online at www.zhongwen.com, but get the book so you can leaf through it. Grouping the characters by radical, this dictionary really can facilitate your understanding of how characters with different meanings are morphologically related to each other. Also, the etymologies in this dictionary consititue a useful mnemonic device. And the pinyin index of words in back helps you quickly check your tones are correct when start reading and helps you quickly find characters.

Harbaugh's dictionary may have to be ordered through Amazon if you are living in China. I haven't seen it in the bookstores here.

[chaz47]

thanks for the advice... there are some good bookstores in my neighborhood... i'll look around and maybe if i cannot find it they will order it for me...