Reading and Writing Chinese: Third Edition, Hsk All Levels (2,349 Chinese Characters and 5,000+ Compounds)

Perfect explanation of characters, easy way to remember, best for hsk exam .. just go for it

Very useful book. I use this for my character study and strictly follow the order. This book is organized that way only.

Nice book to practice Chinese writing

Very useful book to use as a reference tool for those who are learning to read and write Chinese characters.

1. The text is of uniform size with no bigger gap between definitions within one entry than between entries2. The tables showing stroke order are crude, blurry screenshots3. None of the Chinese text is searchable4. There are no page markersThese last two points make the book more or less unusable, because I imagine most people buying this will already have some Chinese and will be using this as a reference book to look up and learn specific characters, which there is literally no way to do because the character index gives only the page numbers from the print edition. So the only way to use this book is to go through from beginning to end, learning all the characters.Amazon needs separate ratings for Kindle and paper editions.

Brilliant book, im teaching myself Chinese and would find it very hard without this, I use it constantly. Every time I come across a new word I use this book instead of the dictionary to look it up (you can use it as a dictionary too by looking up the pinyin in the index at the back then finding the character by its number, theyre all listed in a numerical system). Then I use the book to show me how to write the character, and it also gives you a few words/phrases which use that newly learned word, so you can start to build up your vocabulary and piece things together in your mind about how the language works. Another thing I use this book for is to actually see the characters more clearly and check I have the right one sometimes. Anyone who's ever looked at any Chinese words in books etc will know sometimes, esp with the more intricate ones, it can be very difficult to see what they actually are with all the small lines etc. So by finding a character in this book I can actually see it bigger (theyre each about the size of the top part of your thumb) to look at it in more detail. So its a multipurpose book for me! Brilliant learning tool,i'd highly recommend it to anyone learning to read and write chinese. Im an absolute beginner, have been learning for about a month now and am starting to use it more and more as I get into the language and get in about it all.

I have several books aimed at learning Chinese characters. These are Alan Hoenig's two books which use his own amusing mnemonics. One book is for traditional characters though I personally find the text is too small to use comfortably. The other is for simplified characters, which I would not personally recommend before knowing the traditional ones.Likewise, it turns out that RWC uses traditional for the first two editions and then, for this new third edition, uses simplified characters. Again, I was a bit disappointed that this wasn't clearer from the book details, my aim is to learn traditional characters.Looking more closely though, I am less put off with this new edition for these reasons:1. There are actually relatively few characters which have been 'simplified'. I judge this from the small traditional character which is noted alongside the larger main simplified version. This trad character is a bit small to use on it's own (you would need another source to be sure of the strokes used) but the average of 1 or 2 per ten characters (a double page worth) is small enough to live with. The same conclusion comes from looking at the second edition, trad book and seeing how many simplified characters are given. Again, not that many.2. The additional vocabulary has been modernised and one could usefully use it as review material or even first time through. The total vocab in the book is about 5,000 words made from about 2000 characters, possibly more but substantial in any case.3. The text in both editions is very clear are useable, both the characters, explanatory English text and additional vocabulary.4. The character order is somewhat different though the method of building on characters already given is maintained. It's interesting to dip into and use as a test against the second edition.The only thing I miss in this new edition is the brush-like font. This edition uses rather pointy, almost computer generated script which, though clearly readable, is not as pretty.Compared with Alan Koenig's books, I have to say McNaughton's work remains preferable. He uses mnemonics but usually with reference to the historical roots and development of each character, very interesting in itself. Koenig's mnemonics are fun but rather his own idiosyncratic ideas. They work but the extra info in McNaughton would be of interest to many wishing to engage with Chinese culture.Koenig's traditional book is uses fonts which are really too small for prolonged use, a pity given his obvious and infectious enthusiasm. I hope he addresses this sometime.To summarise then, I personally wish to learn traditional characters. There are many issues around simplified characters which, as a non-Chinese, I don't want to get involved with. With that aim, I have found both the second and third McNaughton editions to be the best resource. The characters and text are clear, including the extra vocabulary which is up to date and useful.I would recommend getting them both, that is the second and third editions of McNaughton, using the second for the traditional script and the third as a further reference and reinforcement. If you had to get just one, it would still be the second edition for traditional characters.For issues around the simplification of Chinese characters, you might read this article:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debate_on_traditional_and_simplified_Chinese_characters

This is a very helpful book for beginners like me, but the kindle version suffers from a serious flaw: the indexes at the back rely on page numbers for finding characters beyond than the basic 1067, but there is no obvious way of finding a given page as the "Page" box on "Go to Page or Location" is disabled and the page numbers aren't shown in the text. It's not all that easy to find the basic characters either, though it's not too bad using "kindle for PC" since you can drag the scroll bar and watch the character numbers (which are shown) change. Until this problem is fixed, you'd be better off buying the treeware version (which I'd probably give the full five stars).

Contents not yet appreciated but back cover has sticky tape which is very difficult to remove and disfigures the item. I am not happy.