Customer Rating:  
Summary: Very good additional material
Comment: This is an excellent example of support material to master Chinese writing and reading step by step. For me personally drawings coming with the characters in the beginning of each chapter are very helpful. The reason to give 4 starts is that I'd wish more context examples (which are no less important for keeping the character in one's memory) and strokes direction indicated. As I use Geneology of Chinese Characters and Tuttle's First / Second 100 Chinese characters these shortcomings are fully compensated for.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Best Book to learn chinese characters
Comment: I have tried many books, audios, dvds and I found this book extremely clever - it presents the information in a clear manner and attached each symbol to a story; it is really easy to memorize characters following this book, Highly reccomend it as well as "A chinese character a day" (pad) -by Philip Yungkin Lee - also check out www.chinesepod.com great stuff.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Great for Learning Chinese with minimal knowledge of the language
Comment: I have purchase many publications and some av materials intended to RE-learn Chinese. Heller's approach is the effective and easy to follow.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Great
Comment: I agree with the other glowing reviews. One of the hard things about Mandarin is remembering the tone of the words. There are four tones - high, rising, falling/rising, and falling. The characters are either building block characters or formed out of two (and rarely three) building block. E.g., the character for good is comprised of the symbol for woman and child and it has a falling/rising tone.
The book has a "dorky" story about each character that help you remember the constituent building blocks which has one of 4 prototype characters woven into the story depending on the tone. Thus, if I am trying to remember the character for lamp, there is story about a giant (which signifies first tone) and fire and nail (the two constituent buiding blocks) plus a sound word which helps to jog the memory.
As someone who went through medical school, I appreciate good mnemonics. This is an excellent book. If you want to learn the hanzi (Chinese characters), just get this book! It teaches the 800 most common characters. But also, it teaches a method to learn even more. When I see a character now, I start making up my own stories following the pattern of the book.
Customer Rating:
Summary: makes it easy
Comment: When you start the book, it doesn't seem like it is going to work. But it does somehow, and it is a rather fun read. I can picture myself going through all 800 characters (I'm in the 50's now) in slow but steady fashion, reviewing them at lunch each day.
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