Enjoy Learning Chinese Characters: Discover their Hidden Meanings Paperback – May 16, 2013

One of the best books for learning Chinese characters. However, it doesn't teach you from the easy to the difficult. Instead, the book summarizes what you have learned so far, helping you to understand the characters in a deeper and more systematic way. I recommend this one for learners who at least around HSK2. If you don't know enough characters to begin with, it will only be a burden to break them down into smaller parts.The good thing about this one is that the authors are Koreans. Why is it important? Because like Japanese and Vietnamese language, Korean language contains a very big percentage of Chinese loan words. When Koreans learn Chinese, for a lot of cases, they do not have to learn the CONCEPT of the words, because they already use them and understand them in their own language. There are a bunch of good books written by American authors, but as a Vietnamese native speaker who has a good deal of knowledge of Chinese loan words (aka Sino-Vietnamese vocabulary), sometimes I feel like the American authors, even though they can use the language with great fluency, do not truly understand of concepts of those vocabulary. Maybe sometimes they just have to oversimplify the concepts to make it easier to memorize.As for books written by Chinese authors, to be honest, sometimes I feel like they do not understand how hard it is for non-Chinese speakers to learn Chinese. Because they are native speakers, so they never truly understand how it works for non-Chinese speakers.This book is not perfect, but I feel they are the most well-rounded so far. At least I haven't bumped into anything that makes me laugh because of the swallow explanations. In addition, Korean people know how to make cute stuff, and this book looks very nice with pastel colors!

AMAZING! That's all I can say. The book is printed in full colour and cute pictures. It is not just a dry textbook! The authors come up with stories for characters, which helps me a lot in remembering it. The book also has a pinyin index and strokes index at the back. I do recommend the book for people who are learning Chinese characters. Totally worth it!

It is a very good book for learning Chinese characters! I have purchased it and am very happy with my purchase.

Great book and it was easy to understand. Also, it was very interesting and I learned a lot. I would recommend this book to learn Chinese characters.

Very useful.

Excellent product.

Researches of the Chinese language and publishers of Enjoy Learning Chinese Characters: Discover their Hidden Meanings Kun Ho Park and Kyung Yong Kong write a practical and systematical guide and handbook to the written language of Chinese. The book may appeal to beginners that would like to learn the Chinese language at a basic level of 1-3. And Park and Kong literally begin where the language originated, through pictograms that date back to their discovery during the 14th to 12th century B.C. and later was adopted by China’s neighbors in the East Korea and Japan; what eventually would evolve to the 250 out of the 3500 characters that exist today originated from pictograms that were inscribed on the bones of tortoises and oxen. And with that brief history in mind, readers will have a better understanding of how these images became the written language in China and the East.The book contains over 500 pages of the most interesting detail that is colorfully and creatively displayed to guide the beginner. Three major factors that Park and Kong emphasize, root, repetition, and memorization of each of the examples of the 250 characters that readers may easily grasp and associate with the language. The sections of the book also provide a format that may be understood as well in terms of people, life, nature that coincides with the five senses of hearing, smelling, tasting, touching, and seeing.For the curious reader or anyone that would like to learn and write from the basics the one of the oldest languages in the world, Enjoy Learning Chinese Characters is one of the most recommended books to begin that journey.

I chanced upon this book at Costco and liked it so much that I bought the eBook too. It's simple to read. You don't have to follow the chapters. Highly recommended for those learning Chinese characters.