250 Essential Chinese Characters Volume 1: Revised Edition Paperback – September 10, 2009

This book is a really great resource. I owned the physical version and loved that because it's got everything you need to effectively learn your Chinese characters: the characters themselves, the radicals, the stroke order, and a big space with lots of empty rectangles to practice writing them in. They also had subsections with compound words that used the character and example sentences using the compound words. It was great! If I was rating that, I would have given it 5 stars!Now for the Kindle edition. Obviously, there wasn't going to be any written component since it's a digital version, but for some reason, a lot of the characters aren't rendering. And if a character is't rendering once, it isn't rendering for the entire book! That means it doesn't show up in its own section, it doesn't show up in any compound words that include it, and it doesn't show up in any of the sentences that use it. And this is what happens for 53 out of 250 characters in the book! That's over 20% of the characters you learn in the book! You can imagine how much of a mess this would be to learn from.Ironically, of the missing characters is Han, which is the character for Chinese, and which is used in Hanzi (Chinese characters) and Hanyu (spoken Chinese). (Yu is missing, too.) This means you can't even express the name for what this book is supposed to be teaching you!Also, this wasn't something that required a lot of digging to uncover. In the table of contents, it lists every character that is going to be taught in the lessons: missing characters render as empty rectangles. That's where I got the 53/250 count. And it didn't take me 5 minutes after I downloaded it to figure all this out. So clearly there was no proofreading done.So as much as it pains me to say it, avoid the Kindle edition of this book! I bought Learning Mandarin Chinese Characters Volume 1 by Yi Ren at the same time, and it doesn't have any of these problems, even though they're both Tuttle books, so it looks like that's what I'm going to be using going forward. It's a third of the price, too!

I spent several months in China a few years back, and while I learned a fair amount of spoken language, the written language eluded me. I tried, but nothing I studied seemed to stick. I recently decided to give it another shot and got this book because I liked the exercises at the end of the chapters. It starts out easy, so the learner has time to get a feel for the patterns, and the words it uses are very common. The illustrated stroke order at the beginning of each section makes it easy to understand (and remember!) exactly how the character goes. It's extremely effective, and I'm finally learning how to write, yay!Update-- still an exceptionally useful book, but I have to laugh about some of the language. At the end of the first section, you're asked to write a very short essay about your family. The instructions include: "Attempt to explore the topic with vocabulary and construction that show both an ability to speak on the topic with depth and the awareness of the cultural concerns that surround the topic." I just barely learned how to write the character for 'age in years', I guarantee that whatever I write will have neither 'depth' nor 'awareness of the cultural concerns'!

I'm just starting to learn how to write Chinese characters on my own. I have a few books on writing but only this book helped clarify the right direction a stroke should go. For example, when I just started learning to write the word "wo" (I) and "zhe" (this), I wasn't sure if the dot (dian) should be written from left to right or from right to left. Also, I was not sure if the horizontal stroke (heng) in "wo" (I) and "bu" (no) should be written from left to right or from right to left. This book has arrows showing the direction of a stroke which really helped me in learning to write properly. Each character presented in this jumbo sized book is accompanied by a few example sentences. I am really happy with this book.

Like others, I first checked this book out from my public library, but after reviewing it at home, almost immediately decided to buy it. Each worksheet has space so you can practice. There's a Book 2! I can't wait to finish this first book and move on to the second!

I know some Chinese characters already. So, the layout of this book is great for me. The book arrived some fast (within 48 hours) and perfectly packaged. Laminated with a cardboard to prevent the book from bending. No scratches at all. I wish Amazon will ship their books this way. I am looking forward to buy Volume 2 in a few weeks. Hopefully, it will arrive the same way.

This book is a must have for everyone that wants to learn Mandarin!! It teaches you how to write/ draw the Chinese charactersand to correctly identify them and what they mean. I'm not finished with this book, but I already need to get the Second one. They are great references for the future!!

There is no other way to learn chinese characters than to write them. 250 essential chinese characters gives you the most used characters not the easiest to write. This is good because these are the characters you will encounter in reading and writing. You will also increase your vocabulare with the stences that are given for practice.

Native Mandarin Chinese speaker but I cannot read/write since I was raised in USA (go figure with the stupid English only policy many people in this country hold) and this is helping me improve my proficiency in Chinese. For Americans who want to learn, this is really helpful.

I already had the first edition of this excellent primer both for beginners and those wishing to refresh their rusty knowledge of Chinese characters. Examples also good for vocabulary expansion. The second revised edition id even better.Highly recommended.I would recommend an audible version to accompany the text

After hsving worked through a couple of characters using this book, I would struggle to go back using other books and free online resources as I was originally. Being shown the correct way to draw each character (as this book makes does) actually makes remembering them so much easier, as the strokes naturally flow in to one another.I would recommend pairing this book with the "Easy Peasy Chinese" from Dorling Kindersley to get the CD which is better than the written pronunciation guide in this book.However for learning how to draw the characters "250 Essential Chinese Characters" is really, really good.

Most excellent book with most helpful presentation. Makes learning Chinese characters enjoyable. Actually bought this copy for a friend as I already have an earlier edition.