Reading and Writing Chinese: A Comprehensive Guide to the Chinese Writing System

by William McNaughton, Jiageng Fan (Primary Contributor)

This is a compete and easy–to–use guide for reading and writing Chinese characters.

Used as a standard by students and teachers learning to read Chinese and write Chinese for more than three decades, the bestselling Reading & Writing Chinese has been completely revised and updated. Reading & Writing Chinese places at your fingertips the essential 1,725 Chinese characters' up-to-date definitions, derivations, pronunciations, and examples of correct usage by means of cleverly condensed grids. This guide also focuses on Pinyin, which is the official system to transcribe Hanzi, Chinese characters, into Latin script, now universally used in mainland China and Singapore. Traditional characters (still used in Taiwan and Hong Kong) are also included, making this a complete reference.

Newly updated and revised, these characters are the ones officially prescribed by the Chinese government for the internationally recognized test of proficiency in Chinese, the Hanyu Shuiping Kaoshi (HSK). The student's ability to read Chinese and write Chinese are reinforced throughout.

Key features of this newly-expanded edition include:

-The 1,725 most frequently used characters in both Simplified and Traditional forms
-All 2,633 characters and 5,000+ compounds required for the HSK Exam
-Standard Hanyu Pinyin romanizations
-More mnemonic phrases and etymologies to help you remember the characters
-An extensive introduction, alphabetical index, and index according to stroke count and stroke order
-Completely updated/expanded English definitions
-Convenient quick-reference tables of radicals
-Updated and revised compounds, plus 25% more vocabulary now offered
-Codes to assist those who are preparing for the AP exam or the HSK exam

Genres: Language, Reference, China, Nonfiction, Linguistics, Textbooks

336 pages, Paperback

First published February 1, 1979

About the author

William McNaughton was the founding teacher of Chinese at Oberlin College. From 1986 he taught at Hong Kong’s City University, where he was the founding program leader of the BA (Honors) program in Translation and Interpretation.

Reviews

[Hyrum · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent reference book for beginning and Intermediate-level Chinese. Well laid out with several ways to look up characters. Common phrases are also listed with each character. The reader should be aware of some obvious errors in this book that may have been made during the printing. However, they are mostly minor and can easily be corrected with a pen.

[John · Rating 4 out of 5]

Excellent resource except for one thing. The authors advise you to learn the radicals but they never tell you under which radical a character belongs. They only tell you which characters are radicals which is a step, but the other is more important. OR create an index. It's not always obvious which radical a character belongs. And, for a perfect book, more help in ways to memorize characters.

[Evan · Rating 1 out of 5]

It wasn't what I wanted/needed. It's nice that things are labeled by HSK levels but the book is basically just a list of characters and meanings. It's like trying to study from a dictionary. Would be better to study the characters in context and it would be nice if the characters were laid out more systematically. If you introduce a radical, then you should follow that with all the level-appropriate characters that use the radical. It's also super weird to jump from a number, to learning how to write woman, to learning how to write another number. Why not put all the numbers together since they're all level 1 and pretty easy to write?

I was hoping to simply review how to write chinese and perhaps learn some more but the random layout made that challenging so I put it on my DNF list.

[ten thousand bees]

not giving a star rating, as it doesn't really fit the criteria for me
but if you're a learner of chinese, beginner or advanced, this is a very useful book
i specifically like how they label the characters with which hsk lvl they correspond to

[Kimhu · Rating 3 out of 5]

Good book for beginners to learn Chinese characters

[Harry Lee · Rating 4 out of 5]

Bought this book years ago! Helping me on my journey to go through the 1000 Chinese characters.

[Adam Balshan · Rating 4 out of 5]

4 stars [Lexicon]
I have read 6 books now on almost nothing but words, but this is my first completed dictionary, of sorts. It is the "Student 1,020" list of characters, supplemented with "The Official 2,000" list, that is, another 980 briefly described. I read most of it 7-8 years ago in Taiwan, and picked it up again a short while ago. It is the best characters-book for the median Western learner that I have seen. (In other words, there might be a shorter book that does a better job explaining with pictures, or a more comprehensive book that does a better job explaining to a scholar.) It features radicals, stroke order, the bastardized "Simplified" character in a corner for reference, and a few common usages.