Reddit reviews Tuttle Learning Chinese Characters: (HSK Levels 1-3) A Revolutionary New Way to Learn the 800 Most Basic Chinese Characters; Includes All Characters for the AP & HSK 1-3 Exams

I believe the symbol was adopted by the Chinese. My information for that comes from this book:

Matthews, A. Matthews, L. Tuttle Learning Chinese Characters: A Revolutionary New Way to Learn and Remember the 800 Most Basic Chinese Characters. Tuttle Publishing. (2007)

In other words you're illiterate. :-)

I like this book.

> I do a lot of business with Chinese companies

Simplified (if you mean companies in Mainland China / PRC)

> Guangzhou

Simplified

> studying the basics

Simplified

> eventually taking the HSK

Simplified

> Which one is most widely used in society?

Simplified

See, I have made it simple for you! ;-)

But seriously, the overwhelming majority of Chinese people use Simplified, and because of that even people who use Traditional will be able to read Simplified. Unless you have an almost exclusive focus on Hong Kong, Taiwan and expat communities in the West, it is much more useful to study Simplified.

By the way, I recommend Matthews & Matthews' Learning Chinese Characters. It is based on the famous Heisig method, but adds memorization hints for pronunciation.

Also read this: http://www.thechinaexpat.com/mistakes-when-learning-chinese/

Good luck!

Tuttle has a lot of admirers and if you like the "story" method of remembering glyphs it can be fun and productive. I don't know if it's as effective for someone who already speaks fluetly, though. The drawback is that Tuttle only uses pinyin. You have to work just with the character and english definition, then supplement by looking up on Cantodict.

Congrats on taking on another language. Mandarin is not easy as far as phonetics go, but super easy when it comes to other things like nouns and verbs. To me measure words made far more sense than masculine and feminine and no conjugation tables!

Here are my tips:

• Find a Pinyin video if you don't have access to a native speaker.
  
  
• Memrise has some great courses on the 5000 most common characters.
  
  
• The Chineseskill app will help with sentences. It's pretty much Duolingo for Chinese. Laokang Tone Test is another really handy app.
  
  
• If you need mnemonics skip Chineasy and pick up Tuttle's Learning Chinese Characters and Reading and Writing Chinese
  
  
• CCTV's Growing up with Chinese is a great series.
  
  Good luck and have fun!
  

Here is the mobile version of your link

I am going to respectfully disagree with you, as someone who is learning both.

Btw, perhaps I should further clarify that I am primarily focused on the reading/translation of the language, not the speaking. This may be an important factor I neglected to add.

I do not disagree that proximity is an aid. This is why French and English are very easy to learn. But Latin and English are two very different comparisons, and are farther in proximity.

As an example of what I was talking about with regards to syntax, there was a cited example in The Unfolding of Language that talked about how amazed Turkish teachers were at Japanese rapid acquisition of their language, in comparison to the difficulties they had with english.

Regardless of the controversy over whether or not turkish and japanese falls under the altaic family, it was clear that the common reason for the rapid acquisition was because of their similar SOV syntax, despite japanese not being an alphabetical language, and the large difference in vocabulary.

Syntax matters.

I think the difficulties of Chinese lie with the pedagogy, not its inherentness. When Greek was first taught to the humanists, it was an abysmal failure because of the lack of established teaching materials (cited from Sailing to Byzantium).

I would like to propose though, you take a crack at reading Chinese, ignoring the conversation. Tuttle has a good book that breaks down Chinese radical components, and should aid in memorization. This is the future I believe.

But I feel otherwise, we may just have to agree to disagree.

I have a book that I think would help that was on Amazon and DB also recommended it after I had bought it. It's not super expensive and it has a lot of explanation about language that isn't in apps and similar resources.

Introduction to learning Chinese

I hope this is of some help on your journey to cultivate in the Chinese language. :)

This Book

This is going to require some blood, sweat, and tears, but it's honestly the best way.

Alan Hoenig, of "Remember the Kanji" fame, made a book about learning Chinese characters. It starts with the simplest characters (e.g. "one") and components (e.g. "straight vertical line") and build each off of eachother. It's an excellent method, and incredibly comprehensive.

Do this in conjunction with some sort of flashcard system (hoetron recommended anki, which is good) and if you commit yourself for 3 hours a day, 5 days a week, for 2-3 months you should be able to get a command of those 2,200 characters.

I'd recommend Hoenig, but if you want to start with something simpler Tuttle is also great.