Rating: 
Summary: Very Useful!
Review: as an advanced chinese student I dont like this thing. i cant articulate why, but it isnt cool. I like "Chinese ABC computerized" much better.
Rating: 
Summary: Good resource
Review: Good resource for learning Chinese characters and meanings. It gives a concise history and explanation for 2000 necessary characters and sets the stage for further learning and growth in Chinese.
Rating:
Summary: Indispensible and essential
Review: I don't want to understate my enthusiasm for this book -- but buy it. It's cheap and extraordinarily valuable. I use this book in combination with my Mandarin II class, Pimsleur Mandarin, and other dictionaries (especially the Harbaugh one -- different and complementary). So WHY is this so great? Learning characters, for me, is not easy (I know about 300-400 at this point). What appears to be complex combinations of strokes are actually combinations of simpler structures. This book organizes the pieces of characters (in big, readable type) and their related parts and actually makes them easier to learn. Most dictionaries just give the meaning, this gives origins and commonalities. The citations refer to pictogram origins, sound loans, and radical inclusion (the basic 1000 are given stroke by stroke for the most part). Some characters (even traditional) have different forms (little stroke variations) and McNaughton explains that in part. Each character is given with a selection of related combinations derived from the main character. Both traditional and simplified characters are included in each citation.The book is inexpensive and helps me. The Harbaugh book is incredibly more thorough, relates characters to others, but doesn't explain the relationships within characters. I have both, and as a first year student, the McNaughton book is more helpful in learning characters and their relationships. As I get more advanced, Harbaugh's book is becoming more valuable. But McNaughton's book is pure fun. On the down side, I wish there were an English index. There are stroke-count, character, and Pinyin indices. Take a look at this historically valuable handbook, and see if you don't agree.
Rating:
Summary: Very useful
Review: I'm learning Mandarin and I can really say this has been more than a big help. Apart from telling you how to 'draw' the character, it works as a dictionary, and it also gives you a short definition about the character, in order to have an idea of the meaning of the 'drawing'.
It even gives you a few examples that end to be quite helpful. It has a few printing problems, and is basically based to traditional characters.
Despite it has the simplified characters, you can't do a search based on them. The only way is to find the traditional, and then you'll see the simplified next to it. Now, if you happen to have the simplified one only, then...
Finally, if the character needs more than 9 strokes to be drawn, then you need to know the generic rules, or you can be in problems when trying to figure out the order of the strokes. In any case, I have to say I'm quite happy with it.
Rating:
Summary: Useful for Learners
Review: McNaughton's 'Reading and Writing Chinese' remains a very useful guide for learners attempting to acquire literacy in Chinese. It comprises two sections, the first listing some 1,062 elementary* characters with its stroke order, Mandarin pronunciation and meaning, as well as a few compound words using the character and the simplified version of the character if it exists. The second section comprises the remainder of the characters in the official list of 2,000 basic characters promulgated by the Chinese government, and gives much the same information as the first section, save the stroke order (which the learner should already be conversant with after learning the first section) and the compound words. The book contains a number of useful indices that may be used to look up unfamiliar characters by pronunciation, stroke-count, etc. *McNaughton has adopted a largely pedagogical order in the presentation of characters. Unlike many books which present the most commonly-used characters first (although this is not to say that the characters he presents are not, in the main, common ones), characters that are geometrically simplest are first presented, and complex characters are built-up from the simpler parts already presented. This does, in many ways, aid the memorisation of complex characters, if their parts are already known, but it also has the effect of presenting some rare, obscure, archaic or otherwise obsolete characters early on, so that they may be used as a section of a more complex, but common, character later on. Similarly, the compound words are chosen so that they only use characters that have already been learnt. One feature that I liked about this book is that it gives hints on learning the characters, and etymological information on the derivation of the character if it is useful for helping memorise the characters. As mentioned before, there is great emphasis placed on the building up of a character from its parts. This edition is a revised version of the 1979 edition containing a number of changes. The most significant change is probably the switch from Yale romanisation to Pinyin. The former was designed for pedagogical purposes, and is perhaps more convenient for English speakers, but the latter is increasingly becoming standard and the switch was probably not unwise. The second notable change is the use of the kaishu (model script) in the head characters in place of the (often idiosyncratically) handwritten characters of the original edition. I thought there was some charm in the handwritten edition, but I suppose, for the sake of standardisation, the new format is better, for the kaishu script is something of a normative standard in Chinese. (The disadvantage is that it looks like it has been written with a brush rather than the pen, whereas most learners would probably use a pen. The differences between brush- and pen-written characters, however, are slight.) The compound words have also been increased in number, and chosen to better reflect the vocabulary of contemporary Chinese, an added bonus, although they really only illustrate the uses of the character, and does not constitute a resource for acquiring Chinese vocabulary. All in all then, it is a very useful book for a learner beginning on the road to literacy in Chinese. I have not given five stars, not because I discovered any major flaws, but because I did not get the impression of outstanding excellence that merits it. I really have no complaint of note to make about the book. (Inclusion of Cantonese pronunciation in addition to the Mandarin, however, would be a welcome bonus.)
Rating:
Summary: Great Buy
Review: This book doesn't mess around- it presents the important characters and how to write them in a logical, organized, format. Too many books out there are not straightforward enough; you are constantly flipping through the pages, wondering where you saw a certain character or bit of information. This rational book has my highest reccomendation.
Rating: 
Summary: Frustrating errors in edition I have been using
Review: This book is a compact and useful guide to writing characters. However, its pronunciation guide is frequently wrong!!! (And there may be errors in the stroke counts as well, I'm not sure if my own methodology is to blame here, but .. . .) This is very frustrating. It uses Yale romanticization unlike the standard hanyu pinyin or the far more useful mandarin phonetic symbols--buh puh muh fuh. I thought it was great until I tried to cross-reference it with my dictionaries. I wasted a few hours looking for a character in one of my dictionaries. Finally, I looked through the pinyin index of Richard Harbaugh's excellent and wonderfully eccentric dictionary, which can be accessed online at zhongwen.com and is sold here as well, ah eureka, but at what cost of wasted time? Bottom line: use with care.
Rating:
Summary: A good supplement
Review: This book is akin to a dictionary. It is NOT an instructional book. From reading the other amazon comments, I was under the impression that I could learn chinese from self-study of this book. This is not the case. Much like a dictionary, it lists the character followed by the meaning and stroke order, and that's it. One could perhaps use this book as a companion dictionary, but I recommend Rick Harbaugh's "Chinese Characters: A Genealogy and Dictionary" for that purpose. In short, this books is not a instruction book, and as a dictionary, it is too short. It is only good at showing you the stroke order of characters.
Rating:
Summary: Just okay
Review: This book is okay and it is actually very similar to one of Rita Choy's books,however I feel that Rita Choy's book is much better organized and has more information. See "Read and Write Chinese: A Simplified Guide to the Chinese Characters"
by Rita Mei-Wah Choy
Rating:
Summary: Great
Review: This book is perfect for those of you who are interested in learning Chinese characters and how to write them. This book has all of the most important characters in the Chinese language, including the list of the 1020 characters students should know and the offical 2000 characters published by the People's Republic of China with over 2500 combinations. This book also includes the all-important pinyin romanization to help you with pronunciation. Definitions, explanations, memorization tips and stroke order is also given for every character. Overall, I think that this is one of, if not the best book out there for learning the written Chinese language.
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