Comments about Fun with Chinese Characters Book, Volume 1:

For what it is, it could hardly be better. It's good to dip into, or to study a page thoroughly.

Each page covers one hanzi, with a square clear character, in simplified form, followed by the traditional if different. There is then a full (50 words or so) description of how the character came about, and a cartoon to illustrate this. There are a lot of examples of compound words (2 to 16, giving hanzi, pinyin & English). Finally, there is a full sentence example of use .
There are 176 pages.
The introduction and preface give an interesting potted history.
I would particularly recommend this to anyone near the start of studying Chinese writing who already knows a few characters (30?) and the principles of stroke order, radicals and sound elements. Because of the amount of information given, it would probably also be useful for more advanced learners.

Comments about Fun with Chinese Characters Book, Volume 1:

This is such a fun book to look through! My son and I enjoyed it a lot. Now he thinks knowing how to write Chinese is really cool. I plan to use this book as a guide when I am invited to his class to speak about something Chinese. I used to pick a holiday such as Chinese New Year to talk about. Now I can talk about the language too. I think the kids (3rd graders) will be fascinated. The only complaint I have is that this book is written in simplified Chinese which I do not know too well, but the characters demonstrated are written in both simplified and traditional Chinese.

Comments about Fun with Chinese Characters Book, Volume 1:

I came across the 3 Fun With Chinese Characters books when I was in Hangzhou, China. I really liked the way each character had pictures explaining their evolution and a short paragraph elaborating the meaning. Having a very basic knowledge of Mandarin language, these books were perfect in forging characters in my memory and understanding. Unfortunately, the books were not easy to find. Now I'm back home and I can't tell you how happy I was to find them on ChildBook.com Even though the books here might be for children, I think we are all kids when it comes to learning something new. And this trilogy is perfect to do so.

Comments about Fun with Chinese Characters Book, Volume 1:

This book is interesting to the new learners. Black and white illustrations are humerous. The explainations for how the characters came to be is helpful for memorization. List ot word combinations are useful. My children have enjoyed these books.