Learning Mandarin Chinese Characters Volume 1: The Characters and Vocabulary You Need to Learn!

by Yi Ren

Reinforce your written Chinese with this practice book for the best-selling Tuttle Learning Chinese Characters.

Learning Mandarin Chinese Characters helps students quickly learn the essential Chinese characters that are fundamental to the language. This character workbook presents 178 Chinese characters and over 534 standard words using these characters. It is intended for self-study and classroom use and includes the characters and words students need to know if they plan to take the official Chinese government HSK Level 1 Exam or the Advanced Placement (AP) Chinese Language and Culture Exam.

Each character is presented plainly and transparently. A step-by-step diagram shows how to write the character, and boxes are provided for freehand writing practice. The meaning and pronunciation are given along with the critical vocabulary compounds and an example sentence. Review exercises reinforce the learning process, and an index at the back allows you to look up the characters according to their English meanings or romanized Hanyu Pinyin pronunciation.

Key features of this Chinese workbook include:
Designed for HSK Level 1 and AP exam prep
Learn the 178 most essential Chinese characters
Example sentences and over 534 vocabulary items
Step-by-step writing diagrams and practice boxes

Genres: Language, China, Textbooks

128 pages, Paperback

Published February 28, 2017

About the author

Yi Ren taught and did research in Beijing after graduating from Tsinghua University. On moving to the U.S. she began to teach Chinese and has more than 15 year Chinese-teaching experience. She has published 15 articles and one book in Chinese. At her adult students' urging, Yi decided to offer her dynamic Chinese teaching method via Chinese for Beginners to help others learn the language while enjoying it. She lives with her family in Denver, Colorado.

Xiayuan Liang practiced medicine in China before coming to the United States. She currently is an associate professor at University of Colorado School of Medicine. In her spare time, Xiayuan likes to read and to discuss interesting topics with friends--in Chinese, of course!

Reviews

[Bon · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book is great at giving you cues for stroke order and things like that, but it came to a point where the exercises were for grammatical and vocabulary concepts not even mentioned in the book and I had to stop. Grrr.

[John · Rating 2 out of 5]

This work may help with writing the characters but it does not help if you want to read Chinese. It provides no grammar, and sometimes adds characters to exercises before the characters are even introduced (pp. 42, 44, 50, 59, etc.) In a couple of cases the character is NEVER EXPLAINED (gua1feng1) and is not in the indices. Learning characters in isolation in my view is useless. You learn them by seeing them best in sentences. Chinese is tough enough without poor editing and learning methodology. Better to learn the characters by mnemonics or the radicals, then begin a graded reader series. Also, better to learn traditional characters first. Believe it or not, they're easier to remember.

[Ryan Zhang · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you already know how to speak mandarin and you just need to learn how to write and read this book is perfect for you. It does a great job of helping you retain what you have learned. If you don’t know mandarin grammar this book was not made for you. By far the best book I’ve used for learning how to read and write Chinese. Many of the other books gives you a bunch of characters to write but they don’t help you implement what you have learned.

[Robert · Rating 4 out of 5]

Good, but only if used in conjunction with other study materials. This book should only be used to learn handwriting and stroke order; it expects you to know sentence grammar already and doesn't have anything to help you pronounce the characters.

[Amelia · Rating 5 out of 5]

I think this super charged my learning journey. Definitely will be doing volume 2 soon