Colors

Chinese	Pin Yin	English
色	se4	color
黑	hei1	Black
白	bai3	White
黄	huang3	Yellow
红	hong3	Red
路	lu	Green
蓝	lan3	Blue

Book Review - 250 Essential Chinese Characters for Everyday Use, Vol. 1

Bought mine in MPH in Singapore as a last attempt to learn chinese. In the past I have bought a lot of book and cd's, but these normally involve memorising the word and tone without giving details of how the word is formed.
I've also tried attending evening chinese classes, but unfortunately their teaching style is the typical cram as much words in your head as possible. Basically the teacher sits there reading words out and writing them on the board. Heck, I could do that at home. Anyway, enough ranting.. getting back to the book.

The overall aim of this book is to be able to learn and understand 250 chinse characters. I absolutely love the way each character is represented. With each character, they explain how it is formed, its traditional form is also shown if available to better understand how the character is constructed.

For each character, they give the following

• Radical - When you refer to a chinese-english dictionary, this is what you will look up
• Character components - what combination of characters makes the character your learning
• Five sample words and sentances (I find this very useful as when you combine the character with another, the meaning can change dramatically. This should broaden the chinese words that you can understand.)
• Writing character steps - At the bottom of each page there are a box of squares for you to practice your writing on. They give a tip for each character you write.

To keep you motivated, the book has a series of tests:
Every 10 characters there is a quiz. This shouldn't be too difficult. Takes less than half an hour to complete these.
Every 50 characters there will be a major test, it took me about one and a half hours sometimes two hours to do this, as some characters are kinda fuzzy after a while. Its a great refresher and good to know how many characters you can recall after a while.

I take a slow pace of two characters per day. So every week I have a mini test and every 5 weeks I have a major test. In addition to this, I watch chinese serials and practice reading the subtitles, I find that after going through 100 characters I can recognise quite a lot of words and sometimes full sentances. Newspapers are a bit too difficult for me at the moment due to lack of vocabulary.

In my opinion, this is the best book that I have come across so far for learning chinese as it explains each character very well as well as gives examples of its uses. It has a series of quizzes to keep track of your progress as well as a major test at every 50 character to monitor your long term progress. Great book, I definately recommend this book, for more info check it out at Amazon.

Deciphering a chinese menu Part 2 - Seafood

	Prawns	虾(xīa)	虫(chóng) provides the meaning and 下(xià) lends its sound
	Fish/Fish slice	鱼/鱼片(yú/yú pìan)	Sometimes this 鱼 character are used in words that sometimes give you a hint that the character is related to the sea for example abalone
	Crabs	螃蟹(páng xiè)	Notice both contains the 虫(chóng) character. By itself it means insect or bug. This character hints the meaning, if you notice above the prawn and crab all have this character in it. Other insects and snakes also have this.