| Learning Chinese The Easy Way: Read & Understand The Symbols of Chinese Culture |  | Author: Sam Song
Publisher: BookSurge Publishing
Category: Book
Buy New: $14.99
as of 9/7/2010 16:21 CDT details
New (4) Used (6) from $14.99
Seller: Amazon.com
Rating:  13 reviews
Sales Rank: 23,680
Media: Paperback
Edition: Bilingual
Pages: 226
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.7
Dimensions (in): 7.9 x 5.2 x 0.7
ISBN: 1419686119
Dewey Decimal Number: 374
EAN: 9781419686115
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Product Description
It's essential to build a solid foundation for learners of any language as early as possible! - THIS IS THE BOOK to help you build a solid foundation of Mandarin Chinese! In the first several years of life, children learn a few words that become a solid groundwork for their language in life. Also children love stories, which are a very important part of language learning. Hence, in the process, the nature of children stories has shown us a successful way to build a foundation in order to learn the language successfully. For the same goal, this series of books are written in a special way that provides readers with the easiest entry point into the Chinese language and also helps readers establish a strong foundation through well-known fables and their entertaining Chinese characters.
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| Customer Reviews:
Showing reviews 1-5 of 13
The Art of Chinese Calligraphy: Learning Language with the Eyes July 8, 2008
Grady Harp (Los Angeles, CA United States)
18 out of 18 found this review helpful
For most Westerners the mystery of the Orient has always been cloaked in the seemingly impenetrable complexity of languages based on characters. The frustration of wanting to learn one of the Eastern languages is usually heightened by the fact that a 'character' can mean a word or a concept and for the Western mind to step away from the building of words from a set of 26 alphabet letters requires releasing the security so ingrained in our 'inside the box, phonetic approach' to learning language.
Sam Y. Song's fine book LEARNING CHINESE THE EASY WAY changes this perception. Instead of devoting the mind to memorizing countless words, arranging them into nouns, verbs, adjectives, etc., Song shows us how the Chinese language is essentially a visual experience - a fascinating exploration of simplifying line drawings of visual things (man, water, eyes, and so forth) and thereby creating visual representations of words created from these reduced lines. Even in explaining the process, Song makes so accessible one of the major differences between, say, Chinese and English, is that need to scientifically dissect symbols relegated to vocabulary instead of merely using the eyes to visualize the objects around us to transmit visuals to the written word.
Case in point: 'look at; see; watch' is a character that is composed of a reduction of a sketch for an eye and a hand that when combined result in a symbol of 'a person watching something with his hand above his eye' or 'to look at, see, or watch. ' Sound simple? With Song's gift for line reduction moving into calligraphy it IS simple, and with the added 'word' for each symbol along side the completed visual, very soon sentences can be constructed or thoughts can be expressed.
From Song's user friendly teaching lessons comes this example of how he accomplishes his Mission: 'How to find a character to express "water" in Chinese?' (he then draws wavy lines, progresses them to the simplest form, compresses them logically) and Presto! we "reach the character \shui\ which means 'water' in Chinese'. Eastern wisdom seduces Western thought into understanding a new form of language. And with Sam Y. Song's technique, it seems that each of us can enter a mysterious world of Chinese symbols comfortably. This is a fine book that entertains as it teaches. Highly recommended. Grady Harp
Makes sense of incomprehensible characters! August 5, 2008
Lesley West (St James, Western Australia)
9 out of 9 found this review helpful
I travel frequently to China, and have often asked Chinese colleagues how on earth the characters that we see today have developed over time. Looking at it from a Chinese perspective, I don't imagine that our Arabic lettering makes any sense either, but Mr Song's clever little book has given me an interesting insight into the development of the written language China has used for centuries.
For those who are considering learning the language but are put off by the written aspects, this is indeed a valuable tool, and far less onerous than the more daunting texts that are out there today. Many people are keen to learn Chinese as this wonderful country continues with its global rise, and this is a wonderful gift for anyone who travels to, or is interested in China and its culture.
It is a little gem!
Highly Effective Learning Tool June 23, 2008
Christian A. Bogue (Columbia, SC, USA)
7 out of 7 found this review helpful
Learning Chinese The Easy Way is a well written text that makes learning Chinese, a typically difficult language to acquire for westerners, an enjoyable process. By putting the language acquisition process into story form and by showing evolution of each chinese character, the author helps to anchor the information with a strong mental image of what the character represents. Shunning the high pressure, information density of most textbooks, this well written book is an essential part of any Chinese language student's curriculum.
Artistic Symbols Are Language of Communication February 2, 2009
Erika Borsos (Gulf Coast of FL, USA)
5 out of 5 found this review helpful
Sam Song has provided a wonderful book which describes in an easy to follow manner a very logical technique for learning Chinese characters and a way of "putting it all together" to read Chinese. The first thing to remember is that it is necessary to write down each character and practice writing it many times, as often as fifteen times to train the mind to recall the symbol and its meaning. The author uses a technique called progression which takes an ordinairy picture and through a few modifications it is altered to become the Chinese character. Using this pictorial version, the reader is able to associate the Chinese symbol with the word which it represents. Chinese writing is a beautiful art form and Sam Song has provided an enjoyable experience to reach the moment of "ah ha" where the reader awakens to the meaning of the word through symbols. At the end of the book are two short stories which the learner can actually read, having learned the symbols for the characters in this book. The author also demonstrates a sense of humor along with providing some interesting historical information while teaching Chinese characters.
In this book, the author tells the reader that traditional Chinese writing is over 5,000 years old but the Chinese government in the 1950s decided to simplify some of the characters and use it as the official written Chinese language. Therefore, in China the "simplified" characters are used but in most places outside of China the "traditional Chinese" is in vogue. The good news is that 70% of the "simplified" Chinese characters are the same as the "traditonal" ones.
First, the author provides the symbol he wishes to teach: for example, the word "watch". Next he provides an easily recognizable picture of an eye. Through progression the eye is slightly altered into a symbol which is again slightly modified and then viewed as an eye. Along with the eye, the author uses the picture of a hand and through some simple modifications, it is changed into the Chinese character for hand. The alterations and modifications provided by the author make sense and the characters come alive with meaning due to his explanations. This book is most highly recommended. Erika Borsos [pepper flower]
The whole learning process is totally fascinating November 19, 2009
Daniel K. Stern (Glendale, WI USA)
3 out of 3 found this review helpful
I am an adult and like to learn independently. Lately my passion has been learning Mandarin Chinese.
At first I thought that I would focus only on listening and speaking (and using Pinyin), but friends advised me that my approach would only take me so far and that to truly advance in my studies, I'd have to learn to read the characters.
I bought this and Sam Song's other book, The Fox and the Goat, on Amazon. The book and the download files that he makes available made learning a large number of characters relatively easy. It's a nice jump start to learning Mandarin.
Showing reviews 1-5 of 13
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