A superbly complete and accurate work, worth every penny! Like the earlier and more portable 71,000-entry ABC Chinese-English Dictionary (another great book, reviewed separately), this is ordered strictly by pinyin, so you needn't know the characters in a word you hear in order to look it up. But it improves greatly on the original ABC in many important ways besides its comprehensive content (over 196,000 entries). Most vital is the addition of the traditional characters next to the simplified for compounds as well (the original had them only for main entries).
A second huge improvement is that the characters making up compounds are now listed singly *even if* they only occur in compounds, e.g., hu2 and die2 (butterfly) are now listed among the other hu2 and die2 main entries, but it clearly marks that they are bound forms occurring only in the compound hu2die2 (so you know not to use them alone). Actually, the dictionary goes into even more detail, distinguishing characters which are bound in one meaning like sheng1 as in xue2sheng1 student, but not in another like 'to give birth'.
Third is the invaluable addition of measure words, in several ways. By an entry such as umbrella (whether you look it up as the character san3 or the compound yu3san3), you'll find "M: 1ba3" (superscripted 1, then 3rd tone ba with diacritical). The measure word is thus ba3, and the 1 means it's the first character listed under the ba3 entries, so you can easily find it if you don't know it. There's also an appendix of measure words (4 pages worth, unlike many of the measly lists in some other books), not only nominal (to count nouns) but also verbal (for actions, like tang4 in pao3le yi2tang4, made one trip). Incredibly helpful!
Fourth, the top quality binding (library-style, cloth) will last a lifetime, and is worth every penny. Fifth, yes, its comprehensive content, over 196,000 entries, meaning it will definitely still be useful to you when your Chinese reaches an advanced, even fluent level, and they've been able to add much more slang and colloquial words, as well as more Taiwan vs. PRC usage.
Finally, (and this is important) the compilers have been phenomenally careful and professional, truly meticulous and accurate, unlike sloppy, error-laden works like UMUM's Learner's CED or Harbaugh's Chinese Characters: A Genealogy and Dictionary. They have also been very responsive to reader input, as is evidenced by the many improvements to this edition. Absolutely one of the best Chinese-English dictionaries in existence, and a definite must-buy!

I am intressting about the price this book in hardcover und paperback editions

This book is good for learning Chinese characters. Ten characters are introduced each lesson and then combined with ones learned in previous lessons. Chinese is often mistakenly called a monosyllabic language and this book shows the true way by showing how the characters can be combined different ways to form usable words. The characters introduced in this two book series are those most frequently used so by the end of the second book the author says you can recognize two-thirds of the characters used even though that is a small fraction of all Chinese characters. The font used in the book is especially big and clear so it's easy on the eyes. This book uses only the traditional form of the characters used in Taiwan and overseas; not the simplified form used in Mainland China.

Excellent book to learn how to read Chinese characters. The excellence stems from several features: 1) the emphasis on combinations rather than characters alone - during every lesson you learn about ten characters but many more words (combinations of two or more characters); 2) large size of the characters - very, very useful for the beginner; 3) systematic repetition -- characters from one lesson are used in the following lessons in a systematic way that helps to build and keep your vocabulary. I can't think of any other book available on Amazon that shares these features. If you get the book, I suggest you buy both volumes together because the appendices with stroke order and simplified characters are at the end of the second volume.

The DeFrancis series of books on Chinese includes "Beginning Chinese", "Character Text for Beginning Chinese", the two volumes of "Beginning Chinese Reader", and I think an intermediate book as well. While I am not thrilled with "Beginning Chinese" as a text (you can read my review on that book), I think that the readers are admirable. They are designed to teach the writing system on its own, independent of the course material in "Beginning Chinese", and yet there is a certain thematic continuity between the two books, so that they can be used as a supplement to each other. The Yale series used the same process in their earlier set of books, which are something of a classic in the field.

The books start off teaching you ten characters a lesson. They build up from the simpler ones to the more complicated, and also drill you on forming words from the characters you already know (most Chinese "words", if you can use the term, consist of two characters, each with a meaning of its own).

DeFrancis apparently produced the book "Character Text for Beginning Chinese" in addition to the Readers because some educators balk at the system of teaching the writing system independently, preferring to teach their students the words they learn to speak as they go along. I've tried both ways, and I really believe that it's a mistake not to treat the writing system as a separate subject with beginners.

You can probably teach yourself to write from these books without too much trouble. However, learning to write Chinese is an aesthetic experience as well as a linguistic one, and I don't know how authentic your handwriting will be without a teacher. DeFrancis takes it about as far as you can in a book, reviewing the traditional ways that Chinese children are taught to write the component parts in a balanced way. The grammatical demands are minimal, since it's assumed that you're using other material for that part of the learning process. On the whole, a very creditable effort, which is no doubt one reason why it has survived as a standard text for so long.

In struggling with some way to get a handle on how to learn Chinese characters in my first Mandarin course, I found Dr. Defrancis' wonderful text, The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy.

He had me hoodwinked and hornswoggled through the early part of the first chapter with only an inkling that something was not quite right. Great device for introducing a complex subject. I'm just now finishing the book and plan to re-read that first chapter now that I'm wearing a new set of evaluation tools.

Is the language at all phonetic? Somewhat phonetic...not at all phonetic? Was it sometime? Will some alphabetic system replace characters? What schemes have been tried in the recent past?

These are some of the questions that Dr. Defrancis tackles and worries over like a barnyard dog. Once he gets hold of an issue, he doesn't let go until he's examined every single aspect.

This is a really rewarding text if you're interested in the Chinese language. (Oh yes, what exactly is meant by 'language' anyway?...read the book for a great discussion.)

Any serious scholar or student of the Chinese language absolutely needs to read this book. He goes about "myth busting" and it is indeed necessary. Most people, including many native speakers, have a rather stereo typical understanding of the Chinese language.
John Defrancis go through a well laid out series of arguments with elucidating examples to drive the points home. Even native speakers will learn from this book as he is one of the world's most renown scholars and authorities on the Chinese language. There are a lot of common misconceptions about the Chinese language and Defrancis provides a well written and illuminating uncovering of those misconceptions. If you want to sound like an authority about Chinese get this treasure.

John DeFrancis' book The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy is the best book I have read on the Chinese language. It explains in great detail what the Chinese language and its ancient writing system is all about. It is also great fun to read.

Based on his profound understanding of the language and its teaching methods, Mr. DeFrancis, in this book, contradicts all misconceptions, myths and fantasies that people may have about the subject. And there are lots of them.

He begins the book by telling a long-winded joke about a Language Committee that was founded by the Japanese during World War II. Its task was to prepare for changing the writing systems of all major world languages into using the Chinese language writing method in case the Japanese emerge victorious and become the rulers of the world. This way, by comparing the two writing systems Mr. DeFrancis makes it abundantly clear that most ideas people have about the Chinese language and its writing system lay on a very shaky foundation. I'll try to mention some points here although it has been a while since I read the book.

For a Western person, it is very difficult to say anything even remotely meaningful about the Chinese language before he has spent a good number of years studying it. We are told, for example, that there is such a thing as the Chinese language, and that it is universally spoken and understood, written and read by all Chinese-speaking people. This is one of the misconceptions Mr. DeFrancis attacks: most of the so-called dialects of the Chinese language are in fact completely different languages with mutual differences as great as those between English and German, or French and Spanish.

Mandarin Chinese has four tones, whereas Cantonese and Shanghaihua have six and nine, respectively. All of these languages use different words for the needs of the basic daily life and, when they do use the same word for a specific purpose, it is pronounced differently. In Pinyin, it is difficult to see whether we are talking about the same word or not, but still, in the Chinese character writing, the same character will be used. This makes it look, for a Western person, like Chinese was a single language that is used universally by all Chinese-speaking people.

Why is it, then, that Mandarin Chinese writing is understood by all Chinese-speaking people all over the world? It isn't, quite simply. Mr. DeFrancis goes on to show how much more difficult it is for a school child in China to learn to read and write as well as most school children using Indo-European languages. He illustrates his point by going through Chinese literacy statistics and expresses his doubts on whether these statistics are true or false.

Another explanation for the "easiness of universal understanding of the Chinese character writing" is the use of ideographs. Allegedly, each character describes its object so vividly that it is possible to understand what a Chinese character means - just by looking at it. Mr. DeFrancis takes it upon himself to do this point quite thoroughly.

The "one character - one word" -fallacy is also given a good going-over by Mr. DeFrancis. He shows, beyond reasonable doubt, that the Chinese language is in fact constituted of syllables, and that these syllables are written using characters. There are dozens of quite different characters that are pronounced identically. The characters representing each syllable of a word may be selected quite arbitrarily.

This is one of the works on the subject of the Chinese language that will really take you beyond myths and fantasies into the real world of facts. Read it and see for yourself.

I guess I've been spoiled by starting out with the most incredible dictionary (Chinese Characters: A Genealogy and Dictionary edited by Rick Harbaugh) and probably find the ABC Chinese-English Dictionary a disappointment because of that.

There is no English-to-Chinese lookup (there is in the Harbaugh dictionary).

There is no character lookup (there is in the Harbaugh dictionary).

There is no bopomofo lookup (there is in the Harbaugh dictionary).

Too large and heavy to pack around campus along with my other books (the Harbaugh dictionary is small and very compact and light enough that I take it everywhere).

I'm hoping that through time I will begin to appreciate the ABC but right now it truly pales in comparison with the Harbaugh work.

When you hear a Chinese speaker use a word and you want to look it up fast, this is the best dictionary for the job. I have both editions of the Oxford, but looking up words in ABC saves me time since it's strictly alphabetical. I recommend the pocket edition which you can take anywhere. It has the same entries as the desk size exactly, just reduced in size. Of course, it would be more useful if it also had an English-Chinese section. The publishers have announced that they have several other dictionaries based on this one in preparation: ABC Chinese-English English-Chinese Dictionary in both pocket and reference editions, ABC Comprehensive Chinese-English Dictionary in pocket and reference editions, Chinese Proverbs, Chinese Etymology, and others.

This dictionary uses the pinyin spelling as the method of look-up this makes all the words that sound the same appear together. Very helpful if listening to chinese.

There is a character lookup, but it just gives you the pinyin for the character.

There is now a pocket version, as far as I can tell the only difference is font size.

English-Chinese, get real! you listen to the chinese and you look it up.

BoPoMoFo? This is a PINYIN lookup system, and uses simplified text (jian ti zi).

All and all a very good book for what it was made for.

This book is a great course book for a beginning chinese course. I believe I am in a good position to review this, being a student at Phillips Exeter Academy in a beginning Chinese course. The book itself is about a smart girl who lives in rural china and would like to attend school. The only problem is that the school (Hangzou) will only accept boys. The girl goes to Hangzou dressed as a man to pass un-noticed in the school. Things start to get interesting when she falls in love with a fellow student. A fun read, but not something I'd read on my own time. It's a good book for chinese teachers who want to teach their students through book reading that I would reccomend.

I really want a book like this, but this isn't good enough. I want a book that gives me a ton of conversational Chinese in Pinyin so I can get a lot of language "practice" with the vocabulary, grammar, etc. used again and again in all kinds of scenarios.

This provides all of that but, frustratingly, it's of no use.

My wife and her family are from China. I let my wife see this book once (the Chinese character edition), and she quickly scrunched up her nose and said, "Nobody talks like this!"

Later, when my wife was out, I tried the same test on my wife's aunt (who doesn't speak any English). She seemed reluctant to comment. I think she was afraid of causing me to lose face, so I showed her another Chinese text that contained hanzi (Chinese for Today, Beijing Languages Institute) and asked which one she thought was better. After about 20 seconds of page scanning she got very excited and said (in Chinese), "Oh, yes, this is the normal way people talk" (yiban de shuofa), and "you should study this one".

Unfortunately, Chinese for Today probably contains less than 10% of the total quantity of example text in Beginning Chinese, with not very useful vocabulary and skimpy grammar explanations, so I'm not a big fan of that one, either.

But despite the wonderful quantity of example material in Beginning Chinese and its sequels, it's of no use to me if what I'm getting so much great practice in is bad Chinese. I can come up with plenty of bad Chinese on my own. ;-)

To be honest, I don't know how much of the "bad" is just the Mainlander's reaction to Taiwanese Mandarin, but my wife and aunt (who like to watch Taiwanese dramas) claim "they don't even talk like this in Taiwan". (I never mentioned Taiwan until after they had rendered their verdicts.)

If only the publishers would update this series to make the language sound natural to the ears of educated Mainlanders, it would be one of the most useful Chinese texts on the market. If that happens, I'll recommend it to everyone.

When I studied Chinese back in the 1970's this was the beginning text we used. I was not extremely satisfied with it then, and I am even less satisfied today. Arguably, it covers the subject of Chinese grammar in considerable detail, but my overall impression of the material presented is that it simply isn't the "way that Chinese really speak" - that is, it really doesn't reflect colloquial Chinese as it is actually spoken, even taking into account that it is supposed to be Taiwan Chinese. It is as if there is too much interference from English grammar in the way it is presented.

I am even less satisfied with it nowadays, with the large amount of language study material now available from China. While some of the material printed in China can be a bore, some of it is really extremely good - Beverly Hong's "Situational Chinese" springs to mind as perhaps the best book on colloquial Chinese I have yet found. I'd suggest to the would-be learner to review the material available from Beijing before investing any of the books in the old Yale Asian series.

I have been studying or trying to study Chinese for many years now. Most books seem more geared toward travel conversation(how much does it cost? etc). This book seems to really teach the language. I think that all languages change fast enough to make any book out of date quickly, this book seems to go deeper and really teach the structure and grammar that can be applied with newer slang. The fact he is aware of the differences between Taiwan Mandarin and the Chinese spoken in the PRC says alot to his credibility. However, the book is dry as are all books of this nature. It does provide a great beginning to learning the language. I think the other levels are now out of print.

This book is the Chinese Character text for DeFrancis' "Beginning Chinese." There are two theories regarding teaching written Chinese to foreigners. One is that you should treat it as a separate subject in the earlier stages of learning the language. For those who agree with this premise, there is DeFrancis' two volume "Beginning Chinese Reader."

The other school believes that students should learn how to write what they learn how to say. For educators who prefer this approach, DeFrancis prepared "Character Text."

If you're a teacher, you can come to your own conclusions without further input from me. If you're trying to teach yourself to read and write Chinese, I recommend that you use the readers rather than this book; learning to write Chinese is a task in itself that has little to do with linguistics. You can read my review of the Readers under their proper site, if you're interested in pursuing the matter.