Flash Cards for Elementary Chinese

Chinese(simplified and traditional)/Pinyin/English cards. 1375 Basic Chinese Characters with 6,000 words and expressions. Very popular and handy tool for Chinese learners. By professors from Beijing Language and Culture University.

Introduction: Chinese characters are the written symbols recording the Chinese language, each representing a syllable. As they are ideographic in nature and are composed of various strokes, the characters look difficult to recognize, write and memorize. This set of character flash cards is designed to help foreign learners of the Chinese language. The set has 1,375 character cards with nearly 6,000 words and expressions. It covers all the characters, words and expressions contained in the elementary Chinese textbooks published in recent years.

On the front of each card is the character in the standard style along with the order of strokes indicated by small figures to make it convenient for the learners to copy. To the left of the character is the Radical to which the character belongs and under which it can be traced in a Chinese dictionary. The component parts that compose the character are given on the right. This is done in such a way as to make the characters easier to memorize. The complicated original and variant forms of the character are provided at the bottom of the card and the serial number is given on the top right-hand corner.

On the back of the card are the pronunication of the character and some words and expressions in which the character is used with their parts of speech, transcriptions in the pinyin form and English equivalents or explanations. We chose one commonly used meaning if the word is translated differently in the textbooks.

The forms, pronunications and radicals of the characters follow the Dictionary of Contemporary Chinese compiled by the Linguistics Research Institute of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (published by the Commercial Press, 9996). The tones of 1, 7, 8 and no, which are cangeable under different contexts, are given as they are actually pronounced.

The cars are arranged in alphabetical order of their pinyin spelling. Characters with more than one pronunciation appear on only one card and the different pronunciations are also given in alphabetical order on the same card. Thus long (chang, zhang) is included under chang. Characters listed under two radicals in the dictionary are placed under one radical only.

This set of flash cards is edited Xiao Xiumei, Ou Qichao, Li Shizhi, professors from Beijing Language and Culture University. The standard characters on the front of each card were written by Mr. An Long.

A great handy for Chinese learners.