Learning to Read Mandarin Chinese? 1000 Most Frequently Used Characters with Tone Colors! by Wang Qila. Fact: If you learn the first 100 Chinese characters in this book, you'll be able to recognize more than 50% of all commonly printed Chinese text! But if you learn all 1,000 characters, you'll be able to recognize over 95% of all printed Chinese text.
Features: Chinese characters are printed in black & white on one page and then again in tone colors on the next facing page, along with the Pinyin and a very brief English definition for each character.
Test yourself by flipping from the black & white page to the color page, memorizing each character’s tone color and it’s Pinyin name. Eventually, by recalling the character’s color, you’ll be able to automatically know it’s correct tone.
It’s very easy to remember which color represents each tone:
1. RED -> High Alert (High tone)
2. ORANGE -> Rising Sun (Rising tone)
3. GREEN -> Green Valley (Down/Up)
4. BLUE -> Deep Blue Sea (Down)
5. BLACK -> Neutral (Neutral Tone)
1000 Chinese characters are presented in the order of the most frequently used to the least frequently used. First, try just memorizing the characters before worrying about their English definition(s). Later, after learning to recognize the character, it’s tone color and it’s Pinyin name, you can then start to add the various English definitions.
Again… by memorizing the tone colors, you’ll find that when you read regular Chinese (black text), you’ll easily be able to recall (visualize) the tone color of each character, hence know it’s correct tone.
The book is interleaved with blank pages so that the printed pages are all facing the same way up, allowing you to conveniently flip “in-situ” between plain black characters and color/pinyin. (The blank pages can be used for your study notes.)
The English definitions are very short and of course there are many other definitions for the same word that cannot be shown. This book is definitely not a dictionary! It’s simply a wonderful visual aid for efficiently memorizing the most common Chinese characters and their correct tones.
Paperback, 158 pages.