Amazon.com: Customer reviews: Chinese Blockbuster 1: Learn to read simplified and traditional Chinese characters and to pronounce them in Mandarin by bringing their building blocks ... with comedy, drama and a few memory tricks

Top positive review

Finally, I will be able to read Chinese!

Reviewed in the United States on March 6, 2017

A new, interesting, fascinating and simple book on how to read and learn Chinese! I always wanted to learn Chinese but was rapidly discouraged by the complexity of the character and how difficult it was to remember them. This book makes it very easy to do so, easy to understand, easy to learn and more importantly, easy to remember their meaning and how to use them. The stories associated with each of the character often made me smile and made the learning fun. This book, finally gave me hope that I will, one day, be able to read Chinese. Thanks!

10 people found this helpful

Top critical review

Critical reviews›

Ben

Is this book pro nazi?

Reviewed in the United States on June 2, 2020

The person who gave a warning that you need to know French is spot on. Almost all of the sound examples are French or German. For example, the word He meaning to ‘join in singing‘, gave the sound word of ‘fernesher’, meaning television in German. That is of little use to an English speaker in my opinion, and one of the only reasons I bought this book was for those sound words.

The page I supplied in the picture also shocked me... pro nazi?!

15 people found this helpful

34 total ratings, 18 with reviews

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From the United States

Amazon Customer

Finally, I will be able to read Chinese!

Reviewed in the United States on March 6, 2017

Verified Purchase

10 people found this helpful

Helpful

Balsha

This is the best and most underrated material on the market for learning Chinese characters.

Reviewed in the United States on May 12, 2022

Verified Purchase

My friend recommended it and I'm stunned that more people don't use the word association method with learning Chinese.

One person found this helpful

Helpful

Mang07

This book will help you

Reviewed in the United States on August 25, 2018

Verified Purchase

The goal of the book is to help you remember everything about a Chinese character—its strokes, pronunciation, meaning, even both simple and traditional versions of the character. I've started using with in parallel with a SRS system that I hope will help me accomplish my goal of being able to read Chinese. It's a very daunting task but I'm more glad than ever to do so with the help of this book. It makes learning Chinese characters exciting. Bravo!

3 people found this helpful

Helpful

Amazon Customer

Love it and can't wait for additional books to be ...

Reviewed in the United States on November 18, 2017

Verified Purchase

This method improves upon what heisig was doing. Love it and can't wait for additional books to be released! I hope Mr. Remillard at least can at least create enough content up until HSK 6!

7 people found this helpful

Helpful

Ben

Is this book pro nazi?

Reviewed in the United States on June 2, 2020

Verified Purchase

15 people found this helpful

Helpful

J. Franklin

Good value

Reviewed in the United States on October 21, 2018

Verified Purchase

Very thorough. Nice book to learn from.

One person found this helpful

Helpful

afman

WARNING: I hope you know French

Reviewed in the United States on April 9, 2019

Verified Purchase

Let me start by saying this book is very helpful. The mnemonics are great, the stories are helpful, the pictures are helpful.

However, the author clearly speaks French. If you do not, ~33% of these mnemonics are useless to you unless you are also willing to learn excessively random French words. I still find them helpful, but as I have no interest in learning French I found the extent of the French mnemonics in an English book very obnoxious.

In fairness, it does seem that French has a lot more syllabic similarity with Chinese than does English though.

24 people found this helpful

Helpful

Nia

Great source for learning

Reviewed in the United States on January 29, 2018

Verified Purchase

I like that it is clear and easy to read.

One person found this helpful

Helpful

Xavier Constant

It really works ! Take two minutes of your time and read why ...

Reviewed in the United States on November 17, 2017

If you really want to learn Chinese, and not waste an indefinite amount of time and energy, this might be your only chance.
The problem when you, as an adult, want to learn chinese, is that you are required to do in a single phase something the Chinese do at two different periods of their lives. First, as any child with their extraordinary capacity for learning, they learn the spoken language. A few years later they go to school, and their teacher shows them nice little drawings, a kind of horse, a fish, an arrow up, meaning up, or an arrow down meaning down, etc. The fact is that they already know that this one is ma2, yu2 shang4 and xia4.
You have to learn all this at the same time.
What are your possibilities ?
Learn the language, without the characters. It is quite frustrating, and, for reasons of homophony, it might prove difficult if you try something more than difficult than what an 8 years old child could say.
Learn the characters without the language. There are nice books for that, and you can find them on Amazon (Heisig, or Hoenig ; the best one, I'm sorry, is in French "l'Idiot Chinois" by Kyril Ryjik).
But you are stuck with the same problem, remembering the sound of each, an arduous task, especially if you consider that some sounds may correspond to a few dozens of characters.
There is only one real solution (two in fact, if you do for yourself the very same thing he did for you, but you have to learn Chinese first ...) : understand how the memory works (the semantic memory is essentially wired to work through associations), or recreate by yourself the art of memory invented by the ancient Greeks (read "The Art of Memory" by Frances Yates if you're interested), and confirmed by many findings of the neurosciences. So you'll be able to understand that the method proposed in this book really works. Buy this book, and the eight or nine to follow (the ebook are proposed at a really nice price), and you'll be able to learn in a few months of dedicated work the very same thing that other learn in a few years. And in the process learn a lot about the culture of the other superpower of the XXIst century.
This is a summary, and a translation, of a comment I posted on Amazon France. They rejected it. I still don't understand why. I hope this will not be the same with Amazon US

38 people found this helpful

Helpful

From other countries

Chandrika John

Excellent resource

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on May 31, 2020

Verified Purchase

Well thought through and an interesting way to learn Mandarin. Informative and well presented. Immense thanks to the author!

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