Great aid for learning chinese!!, March 19, 2006
　

I am in the process of learning chinese and this is a fantastic book and tool to learn how to read it and write it. You can learn the basic radicals or roots of the most important or common words.
Congratulations to the author for writing this gem and my thanks to the other 2 reviewers for helping me to find it!

Amazing!! Philosophy of the language , January 18, 2006
　

This book is amazing! The publisher should really let Amazon show you a couple sample pages - that would tell the story much better than my description. But since they have not - here is my attempt:

The author attempts to trace the lineage and reasons for each of the characters in this book (there are about 100,000 chinese characters - he only shows 2 per page in this 185 page book). In chinese each character is a word. It seems most characters are composits of 2 characters. He looks at the shapes to see if he can make pictographic sense of the characters and radicals. And he draws cartoons of what he sees, and adds explanations and even lists some similar words.

Sometimes his explanations are more of a strech than others. Sometimes it is very clear and very insightful. By understanding what goes into a language or, in this case - that is when every character is its own word - the written language is its OWN language, you gain insights into the world and how the people understand it. In this respect it is heavy duty philoosphy.

Like another reviewer I borrowed this book. Within minutes I was convinced I have to own it - it is worth spending LOTS of time studying. And it is worth spending lots of time also because it is enjoyable - simply fascinating.

What's in a Chinese Character - Indeed!!!, January 24, 2005
　

I have been studying Mandarin Chinese for just over a year. I found this book to be a fascinating one. I read a borrowed copy and now just ordered my own. It might less interesting for someone who is not studying Chinese characters, but for those who want to learn to read, it is excellent.