Chinese Character Fast Finder allows users to find Chinese characters based on their appearance alone, without knowing their pronunciation, radical or stroke count. This reference book has been designed for serious learners of Chinese as well as readers with an interest in written Chinese.
Convenient features include printed thumb-index marks for rapid access to any character; all the characters prescribed for the Chinese government's official HSK (Hanyu Shuiping Koshi) Language Proficiency Test, and simplified characters and their pinyin pronunciation.
Chinese Character Fast Finder A really helpful book in quickly looking up Chinese Characters, however, the book only covers 3,200 characters and therefore cannot be the only dictionary the you may own. It works well together with other dictionaries, and is especially helpful in finding common words that do not have a clear radical. Remembering that the common less complex words in Chinese are often the most difficult to find, this is where this book excels. Please also note that the book does not cover compound words therefore you need another source to truly understand the meaning of the word (especially in combination with other words). Just as in English if you did not know the meaning of the word "honeymoon"; looking at the word would lead you astray. A Chinese equivalent is "ma shang" "horse up" means "at once", this book cannot help you with this situation, and therefore you must have other dictionaries together with this tool.
Chinese Character The book is well organized and easy to read. The only neg I can think of is that it only talks about simplified characters and not traditional as well.
Priceless The usual process of looking up characters in a chinese dictionary was extremely frustrating and time consuming. So much so that I had nearly given up on it. Then I found this book. It's brilliant, simple, and fast, and easily the best money I've spent on various language-related references. My sincere thanks to the author, and my strongest recommendation to anyone who needs or wants to learn how to read chinese.
Concise and helpful Quite comprehensive and very easy to use, this fast finder is really helpful to quickly look up chinese characters even if you are not familiar with the language.
It's, well, FAST! This is an awesome reference. In just a few minutes I could find nearly any character. The thumbed index that you can cut yourself, if you so choose, makes the lookup much faster. (Initially I used a razor blade but finally just used scissors.)
If you happen to look up the character in the "wrong" place, instead of cross-referencing characters to another page, he just shows them on the page in grey. That way, you know they really don't belong there but, hey, since you found them, the meaning is provided.
He also includes traditional characters in the appendix.
Anything Goes Trivia
Megaton Man
Trevor
