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A few years ago I bought a copy of Laurence Matthews’ Chinese Character Fast Finder. I was pretty excited when I bought it. It was great to think that you could find characters without going through the tedious traditional method. I also found that this book had a feature that I had always wanted, which was a list of all the characters (3,200 in the book) in pinyin order. This is such a simple thing, but very useful. I also liked how characters that looked similar were grouped together. They were written with a big font and easy to see. That meant that it was easy to distinguish similar-looking characters that tended to be confused with each other.
After I had been using it for a while I realised that it is not as useful as I hoped for its primary purpose. The reasons are principally that it is indexed only on radicals and then grouped by “shape”. However, “shape” is a subjective term and I often would choose the wrong shape and then take even longer to find the character.
Another reason that it fails is that it contains just 3200 characters. That is a lot, but normally the characters I was wanting to identify were rarer characters. There were almost 5000 possible characters that were not listed.
However, I am thankful for having bought this book. It inspired me to find a better way to search for characters. I decided that a really useful book had to have as many characters as possible but present them in such a way that the reader easily recognised the most common characters from the least common characters. I decided to index every part of the character and I decided to permit searches on combinations of components. Where possible I also added the ability to search on the pinyin value of a component, where the component was also a character.
Chinese Character Fast Finder was the inspiration for this book, Chinese by Numbers, and I believe that my book better achieves the goals of Matthews’ book.
Available from:
http://www.amazon.com/Chinese-Numbers-ultimate-method-characters/dp/1922022241
http://www.bookdepository.com/Chinese-by-Numbers-David-Pearce/9781922022240
http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/chinese-by-numbers-david-j-pearce/1110603411?ean=9781922022240
Australian sales:
http://www.vividpublishing.com.au/chinesebynumbers/
UK sales:
Chinese by Numbers 