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Chinese character ebook

Easy Learning : Chinese Characters

Easy Learning : Chinese Characters (ISBN: 9781456416348) is designed for English speakers or anyone who has a good command of the English language. Unlike Chinese speakers, English speakers are used to a phonetic writing system, that is-“what they read is what they hear”. When they see an English word, they expect its letters to tell them the pronunciation and recognize its meaning. Thus English speakers find Chinese characters to be too complicated and confusing because they cannot pronounce them easily. Without a phonetic system, they have to find the pronunciations through pinyin and then find the meaning. Therefore, English speakers think they need extra time to learn to connect the graphic shapes of Chinese characters with their pronunciation. So learning the Chinese language can seem like learning two different languages: one for listening and speaking, and the other for reading and writing.

However, if you can master the methods of learning Chinese characters in this book, you will get twice the results with half the effort! Easy Learning : Chinese Characters can make your Chinese character learning process easy and fun! It is intended to be an intensive course book for English speakers who have just started to learn Chinese writing. Anyone who has pinyin as a foundation can study this book by themselves. This book has 86 lessons in total with detailed explanations of 550 basic Chinese characters and over 2400 Chinese words and phrases. This gives learners the foundation from which they can expand to read the 4000 basic Chinese characters. With basic knowledge of the evolutionary history of Chinese characters, learners will gain a brand new perspective and profound understanding during the learning process.

Over 90% of the characters in Easy Learning : Chinese Characters are accompanied with pictures showing how the character evolved from its original shape to its current simplified form. Only less than 1% of the characters in this book may need to be memorized mechanically but even they are provided with vivid pictures to help remember them. All of the characters, words and phrases are provided with detailed pronunciation in pinyin. So all the lessons taught in this book should be easily mastered by new learners.

All languages are connected. Chinese is similar to English in numerous ways. Pictophonetic characters make up over 90% of all Chinese characters. By mastering the rules of pictophonetic characters, one can read most of the characters. Chinese radicals (the part of a Chinese character which represents its meaning) are like English monograms. Monograms represent the meaning of words, for example, words containing "astro" are mostly related to stars. Easy Learning : Chinese Characters focuses on teaching you to master basic character forms including pictographic characters, self-explanatory characters and ideographic characters. These make up the foundation of all characters. This book references several Chinese language sources in order to provide precise and detailed explanations of each character. These sources include: The Contemporary Chinese Dictionary, Advanced Chinese Characters Dictionary, Kangxi Dictionary and Shuowen Jiezi-Explaining Simple and Analyzing Compound Characters.

With the help of Easy Learning : Chinese Characters, learners will have the confidence to master Chinese reading and writing in a relatively short period of time.

Please take a look at the Sample file

Editor’s recommendation:

I’ve known Ping or “Apple”, as she likes to be called, for a good number of years and she has always had a passion for teaching Chinese. In fact, I first began studying Chinese online with her in preparation for a trip to Beijing. I know she has put a tremendous amount of work towards this book and so I was glad to be the editor when she asked.

Editing this book was also very beneficial personally, as I got to study along the way and learn many new Chinese characters together with their evolutionary history. I have studied other Chinese character books but what sets this one apart (and what I found to be incredibly interesting) was actually seeing their development over thousands of years. It is quite amazing to look at pictures of these changes side by side. I could really get a sense of how they started out as literal picture representations of things and then slowly developed into characters which were more abstract, but easier to write.

I think this book is both an excellent way of learning the characters and a fascinating reference guide to their historical development. I hope that you enjoy this book as much as I have.

Robert Gray

Reader’s Reviews:

(1)Dear Ping, Congratulations. I have just bouoght and downloaded your ebook Easy learning Chinese Characters and I am ver excited about. You can't imagine the many books I have on the subject of Chinese etymology. Yours is fabulous. HEARTIEST CONGRATULATIONS FOR A VERY BEAUTIFULLY ILLUSTRATED BOOK. Eugenio Llorente from Madrid, Spain.

(2)I have bought this Chinese character learning ebook a couple of weeks ago. I am impressed by the content in this ebook.It is very easy for me as a middle-level Chinese learner to follow the content by self-study.I strongly recommend this ebook to you.