A Dictionary of the 3,500 Most Frequently Used Chinese Characters

Book excerpt: This book is a reference manual for the 3,500 most frequently used Chinese characters in the People’s Republic of China. Its purpose is to serve Western learners of Chinese as a reference manual for the Chinese script system. The Chinese characters in this book are ordered according to their number of individual strokes, a system that is explained in detail in the introductory part of the book. For each character entry, the Roman transcription of the same is given in according to the Hanyu Pinyin transcription system to indicate its pronunciation in modern Chinese. Other information given for each character entry includes English meaning definitions as well as stroke order demonstrations in a step-by-step procedure to demonstrate its way of writing. As an appendix to the book, a table of radicals for Chinese characters is included.