Understanding Chinese Characters by Their Ancestral Forms

Rating:
Summary: Good starters book for learning Chinese writing
Review: Chinese reading/writing can be an intimidating subject for new students, but what better way to start than understanding what all those signs in Chinatown mean? The author Ping-gam Go did a wonderful job with this book. He included color photographs of signs from Chinatown in San Francisco. This book teaches the reader to understand how to read traditional Chinese characters. Each word is described in context of its historical pictograph background, going back thousands of years in Chinese history. Many of the Chinese characters actually look like the thing they describe. With this knowledge, memorization of the characters was much easier for me. I found myself recognizing many words in Chinatown thereafter. This book is very thin (less than 100 pages) but it packs a wollop with the knowledge it conveys. There are several hundred characters defined/described in it, and if you can remember half of them, you're on your way to learning Chinese. It doesn't teach writing at all, but if you understand basic Chinese caligraphy, you can figure it out yourself. By itself, this book is insufficient to learn to read/write Chinese. It is a great companion book to a more in depth text on the subject. However, Ping-gam Go is quite successful with his goal. Even after reading a few pages, I was able to walk through Chinatown recognizing characters I've never known before, and it was like a whole new world opening up. Highly recommended!

Rating:
Summary: Good starters book for learning Chinese writing
Review: Chinese reading/writing can be an intimidating subject for new students, but what better way to start than understanding what all those signs in Chinatown mean? The author Ping-gam Go did a wonderful job with this book. He included color photographs of signs from Chinatown in San Francisco. This book teaches the reader to understand how to read traditional Chinese characters. Each word is described in context of its historical pictograph background, going back thousands of years in Chinese history. Many of the Chinese characters actually look like the thing they describe. With this knowledge, memorization of the characters was much easier for me. I found myself recognizing many words in Chinatown thereafter. This book is very thin (less than 100 pages) but it packs a wollop with the knowledge it conveys. There are several hundred characters defined/described in it, and if you can remember half of them, you're on your way to learning Chinese. It doesn't teach writing at all, but if you understand basic Chinese caligraphy, you can figure it out yourself. By itself, this book is insufficient to learn to read/write Chinese. It is a great companion book to a more in depth text on the subject. However, Ping-gam Go is quite successful with his goal. Even after reading a few pages, I was able to walk through Chinatown recognizing characters I've never known before, and it was like a whole new world opening up. Highly recommended!

Rating:
Summary: terrific reading -- easy to see ancient art form in Chinese
Review: Ping-Gam creates a vivid survey of current Chinese writing visible in San Francisco's Chinatown, revealing the hidden art, myth, and culture within the characters of the written language through ancestral forms.

Rating:
Summary: Really fun book!
Review: This is a really neat book to just browse through. It is interesting how Chinese characters evolved from their ancestral forms.

Rating:
Summary: Really fun book!
Review: This is a really neat book to just browse through. It is interesting how Chinese characters evolved from their ancestral forms.