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Rating: 
Summary: An excellent introduction
Review: Chinese is a fascinating language, and /Teach Yourself Beginner's Chinese Script/ is a wonderful introduction. It moves rather quickly, but is filled with varied exercises that keep you thinking and help you gain a better feel for working with the script. "Mini Tests" divide the book up, offering genuinely challenging exercises to see just how well you understand the concepts you've learned thus far.Complete with a chapter on how to properly write characters, an introduction to looking up symbols in a Chinese dictionary, and a general overview of how to input Chinese characters on computers, /Beginner's Chinese Script/ is a very well-rounded book. I highly recommend it as a starting point for gaining a better understanding of this complex (but delightful) language. Don't let the small size and low price of this book fool you - great things come in small packages!
Rating:
Summary: Excellent Guide to Chinese Characters
Review: I am a beginner to learning Chinese and I find this book an excellent guide to understanding chinese characters, its components and why. I recommend this book to anyone who wish to be able to recognize and read chinese characters. The author has provided an excellent description regarding the radicals and phonetic components of chinese characters.
Rating: 
Summary: Ambiguous and Dull
Review: My work with this book has been reduced to memorizing the various characters that come with the book. The exercises, while plentiful, would be a lot more helpful if they stuck to helping the reader learn characters that it had introduced, rather than characters containing the radicals it teaches. I can't imagine I'd have accomplished much if I hadn't already been familiar with many of the meanings of the characters from my work with Japanese. The cultural points made in the book are too few and far between. Overall, making through later chapters becomes drudgery. Perhaps 'Teach Yourself Chinese' is better?
Rating:
Summary: Ambiguous and Dull
Review: My work with this book has been reduced to memorizing the various characters that come with the book. The exercises, while plentiful, would be a lot more helpful if they stuck to helping the reader learn characters that it had introduced, rather than characters containing the radicals it teaches. I can't imagine I'd have accomplished much if I hadn't already been familiar with many of the meanings of the characters from my work with Japanese. The cultural points made in the book are too few and far between. Overall, making through later chapters becomes drudgery. Perhaps 'Teach Yourself Chinese' is better?
Rating:
Summary: Most Poorly Bound Book I've Ever Bought
Review: The content is alright, but I'm giving this book a poor rating because of how horribly it is bound. I got this book only three days ago and today it is literally falling apart. I mean there are about fifteen pages coming out right now. I'm a bibliophile and not one to mistreat my precious books, so it is not due to any fault of mine that this book is falling apart; it is just terribly bound. It's like they took Elmer's glue to hold the pages together. Oh my God it is so bad... The content is okay, but good luck opening it for the first time without twenty pages flying out. I wish more of these language books would come in hardcover.
Rating:
Summary: Teaches the basic for a tourist.
Review: This book is really fantastic. It shows you the basics for the chinese script origin and gives you a basic understanding of the written language by associating it with everyday situations. Through the numerous examples from real chinese setrtings it teaches you how to guess a possible meaning for a character by noticing its background (e.g. if it is on a restaurant menu, airport lounge information etc.) and compounds. This is particularily important for the everyday traveller to China who doesn't have the time to learn a lot of characters but has the basic intelligence to associate a character with its possible meaning. It also has a very practical pronounciation guide and a guide to chinese computer input methods at the end of the book but unfortunately doesn't give the pinyin for all the characters that are presented in the book.
Rating:
Summary: Understanding - not Memorizing
Review: This book is the first I have come across that teaches Chinese characters by helping the reader to understand how they are formed. Other books plunge right into the presentation of characters that must be memorized, quickly overwhelming the reader. In this book you will understand the logic behind the evolution of the characters, the use of radicals in compound characters, the composition of multiple character words, interpretation of characters in context, and how to correctly write these characters yourself. Elizabeth Scurfield explains the rules behind stroke order and gives many examples as the characters progress from simple to more complex. Each unit builds logically on the preceding unit, so learning is gradual and easy. If you are just beginning to learn Chinese writing, I couldn't recommend this book more highly. You will need to look elsewhere to learn the spoken language, not much help here (although Elizabeth Scurfield does have another very good book that teaches both reading and speaking Mandarin). Once you have mastered the material in this book, you will need to find a more advanced book if you wish to become proficient. This truly is just a beginning - but a very good one.
Rating: 
Summary: A lot reading, few writing
Review: When I bought this book, I was hoping I could learn how to read AND write Chinese characters, but this book did not achieve this goal. The book only dedicates one chapter for writing Chinese characters and hardly gives the stroke order of other characters in later chapters. Also, it never shows you the written forms of characters which can be different from the computer typed forms. The book is also very overwhelming by presenting a lot of characters in a short period of time. The only logic I see to this is developing your reading skills, which is good. That's why I give this book three stars. However, when I tried to write the characters, it was very difficult. One last thing I do not like about the book is that it only presents simplified characters. It is necessary to learn both Simplified and Traditional Characters in order to understand Chinese, since Traditional characters are becoming more popular lately. A good book for learnig how to write both Simplified and Traditional Characters is 250 Essential Chinese Characters for every day use (Volumes 1 and 2)By Philip Yungkin Lee.
Rating:
Summary: A lot reading, few writing
Review: When I bought this book, I was hoping I could learn how to read AND write Chinese characters, but this book did not achieve this goal. The book only dedicates one chapter for writing Chinese characters and hardly gives the stroke order of other characters in later chapters. Also, it never shows you the written forms of characters which can be different from the computer typed forms. The book is also very overwhelming by presenting a lot of characters in a short period of time. The only logic I see to this is developing your reading skills, which is good. That's why I give this book three stars. However, when I tried to write the characters, it was very difficult. One last thing I do not like about the book is that it only presents simplified characters. It is necessary to learn both Simplified and Traditional Characters in order to understand Chinese, since Traditional characters are becoming more popular lately. A good book for learnig how to write both Simplified and Traditional Characters is 250 Essential Chinese Characters for every day use (Volumes 1 and 2)By Philip Yungkin Lee.
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