This book sets out a clear learning progression that will help students make faster progress in acquiring the language skills needed to read and write Mandarin Chinese. It concentrates on the 25 most commonly used radicals giving a clear explanation of their meanings and how to recognise them in their distorted forms. It introduces other characters that include these radicals helping to build a vocabulary that is relevant to beginners. For the first time it draws the students attention to those characters that carry the phonic, and this enables the students to look at a new word, have some idea of how it might be pronounced. Understanding the radicals, their meaning, their distorted forms, and learning which characters carry the phonic is the fastest way to achieve a basic literacy in Chinese.