Consider for a moment the fact that Chinese characters have no equivalent to "alphabetical order." Now imagine trying to use a dictionary. With this guide you have a fighting chance. Designed for serious students but also accessible enough for beginners and browsers, the guide arranges characters on the basis of how they look alone, so users can quickly check meanings and pronunciations of characters, as well as their stroke counts and radicals. It also compares modern with traditional characters. The best news is that this guide contains 3,200 characters, including all four levels of the HSK test, and you can probably get through a newspaper with about 2,000 of them. Annotation ©2005 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)