Product Description: Whether on a train from Beijing to Shanghai or sitting under a tree in Berkeley, you can be practicing your Chinese with this quick and easy-to-use set of flashcards. Chinese in a Flash Volume 1 has a full range of features to help beginners and intermediate learners through character recognition, vocabulary recognition, revision, and testing. It includes indexes by radical, stroke count, and alphabetically by pinyin romanization.
Excellent for learning Chinese characters These flashcards cover 500 characters (and some vocabulary). Sign is on one side and pinyin and english is on the other side. Good quality, thick paper that will last. There is a Vol 2, Vol 3 and Vol 4, so if you get past these 500 cards you can add another 1,500 cards.
Wish I hadn't bought them... These cards are well made, no problem there, and the design of the cards are great. The problem is that each character is printed separately on its own card, whereas a high percentage of Chinese vocabulary are made of of two characters; for example, "garden" is hua-yuan, but, there's a character card for hua and another card for yuan. It would be like English cards that had a card for base and another card for ball, but, no card for baseball as one word, or for sweet potato or for study hall. The cards would work well for learning to recognize distinct, separate characters, but not for practical vocabulary practice : you may not mind this, and I wouldn't have imagined it to be a problem, either, but, for what it's worth, I no longer use the cards (instead,I have made my own so I have all of those two-character words on one card...).
Good flashcards Despite what others have said, these have a 2003 copyright and have Simplified/Traditional + stokes on the one side; and on the other sid there are a few examples and a few uses of the character in different compounds.
Pros: 1) I like the size because they are portable and they seem to give you many of the most frequent characters.
2) I am using T'ung and Pollards colloquial Chinese and on chapter 14/17, I have been able to use about 3/4ths of the cards.
3) These cards are a) a cheaper than many othes and b) you can expand them more than any other set by adding volumes 2,3,4 which will give you about 1800 characters total.
Cons: 1) Use: The translation is on the top left corner along with the small version of the character so you need to cover the character with your thumb and try not to look at the rest of the card if you want to use them in reverse.
2) Use: would have been nice to list the character's type (i.e.: M, SV, V, MV, ...).
3) Customer Service: I seem to have lost the 16-page booklet which allows you to look up the characters by number. Although I emailed Tuttle a couple of weeks ago to see if I could get a PDF of the 16 page booklet, they have not responded.
Chinese flashcards These are handy if you are trying to learn Chinese characters. You can sort them out as you learn them so the pile of known characters gets bigger and bigger. They have useful phrases on them to put the words in context.
Fatal flaw for conversational Chinese learners These cards look impressive, but they have one noticeable flaw. On the front side of the cards, they only have the Chinese characters, and not pinyin. This flaw is unfortunately fatal for beginners and even many intermediates. For many novices, pinyin/conversational Chinese comes first, followed by characters over time.
For those who want to focus on conversational Chinese (and have no/limited interest in written character Chinese), I would recommend "Speak in a Week! Flash! Chinese 1001 Cards" as a better alternative. They have BOTH characters and pinyin on the front, and simple definition on the back. Even better, the cards are colored differently for nouns, adjectives, adverbs, and verbs (colors have been shown to help with memory).
Note: On Amazon, "Speak in a Week! Chinese" is listed as being available in Feb. 2008, but I just picked them up for myself in Borders (Nov. 2007).
Anything Goes Trivia
Megaton Man
Trevor
