Chinese by Numbers is not an academic text. It was written by a student of Chinese to meet the needs of learners.
While I have been learning Chinese as a pastime of mine for the last 10 years, I often had these experiences:
- Spending a lot of time looking up a new character
- Then finding that the character is not listed in my regular dictionary
- Knowing the approximate pinyin but wanting to quickly confirm the tone of a character
- Wanting to confirm the exact form of a known character that I wanted to write
- Wanting to know if the new character I just found was worth remembering
Most reference books don’t meet these needs:
- Dictionaries all use the radical + stroke count method that can often be quite slow
- Most dictionaries for students only have 3000 to 4000 characters. While the rest are not common, they come up often enough to be really frustrating
- Dictionaries are quite useless for just reviewing the tone or exact form for a known character
- Dictionaries give equal prominence to the least important characters
For me Chinese by Numbers as a reference book is the most important aid to carry.
- Quick look up
- All characters listed
- Compact listing
- Concise definitions
- Prominent display of important characters
Read other pages on this site for more information, or make an online purchase and see for yourself.
[NOTE: Chinese by Numbers is a ‘print on demand’ book. Each order is printed individually, specially for you, so the price is higher than other books sold to clear remainder stock.]
Available from Amazon and other online sites:
Available only online
Chinese by Numbers 