Understanding Chinese Characters by Their Ancestral Forms

by Ping-gam Go

The reader will discover that it takes little effort and imagination to understand the most common and widely used characters. Ping-gam Go provides a full-color photo survey of San Francisco s Chinatown and a dictionary of 288 Chinese characters, each entry contains the Mandarin and Cantonese pronunciations, ancestral pictograph, traditional Chinese character and English definition. Dozens of practice exercises and flashcards are provided to assist in memorization of the meanings of the signs in Chinatown.

Genres: Language, Reference, China, Nonfiction, Linguistics

128 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1977

Reviews

[Genni · Rating 3 out of 5]

Another library whim. Although the scope of this book was very narrow, I found it really useful. It was written by an amateur multi-linguist who began learning Chinese quite late in life. He introduced the ancestral history of 288 characters, specifically those that can be found most often in San Francisco's chinatown. I am not sure if it could truly help someone with little to no understanding of the written language, but for me, it revealed more depth of meaning to the characters I already knew. However, I found it lacking in several ways. 1) There is no phonetic pronounciations given until the end of the book. You will learn the meaning of a character, but not how to speak it. 2) stroke count instructions were partial. He never explains that some strokes may look as though they have two strokes, but actually only have one. 3) he doesn't explain how some of the ancestral characters with completely different meanings ended up with the same radicals in modern Chinese.

One neat aspect of the book is a photographic "walk" through Chinatown to recognize characters in their context. (But again, without romanization).

Overall, it whetted my appetite to study the history of the written language more.

[Jonathan]

None

[Hannah · Rating 5 out of 5]

Must keep learning! Books like this really help! Yay! ^ - ^