Learn to read more than 100 essential Chinese characters with lessons that build your vocabulary one character at a time and include hundreds of practice sentences and phrases. The characters in this book were selected to expose you to a variety of grammar patterns and common words. Your grammar intuition will quickly grow from simple phrases to sentences.

For example:

one

One (of something)

One person.

A/One small person.

Eleven small people.

Eleven small women.

Eleven women are very small.

Twenty-one women are very small.
And so on.

In order to help you learn to decompose and recognize characters, the stroke order, traditional (long) form if any, meaning, and components of each new character are introduced first. The lessons also contain activities to help you remember characters and vocabulary through periodic repetition, as well as reading comprehension exercises.

When you finish this book you will know a little more than 28 percent of the characters you will encounter in any given text on average.