J. Marshall Unger

Any volume on Chinese that combines wit with hard facts is a winner on my list. I loved this book. Author Unger quotes Dave Barry ("Dave does Japan"--the chapter that made me laugh out loud), punches the arrogant air out of Ezra Pound and Ernest Fenollosa's translations of Chinese sonnets (some of which are so bad they are almost as worthy of laughter as the Dave Barry piece), rightly rips to shreds Leonard Schlain's chapter on Chinese language in The Alphabet versus the Goddess: The Conflict Between Word and Image, but heaps honest praise where it is deserved--whether it is scientists who have studied right brain/left brain issues or cartoonists who can explain how and why words/images work in cartoons. He also generously shares a magician's secrets (Harry Lorayne, How to Develop a Super-Power Memory), translating them into a chapter on how to learn characters faster using Lorayne's three basic techniques. And along the way you'll learn how Chinese kanji work in Japanese and why Japanese comic books have become so popular.

As for the title: Ideogram, as one of my academic heroes, Victor Mair, writes in the Foreword, "Anyone who reads this book from beginning to end--parts of it are easy and fun, others are challenging and demanding--will surely come to the same conclusion as the author: in reality, there is no such thing as an ideogram" (p. xi).

This book is must reading for anyone learning Chinese or Japanese and I only wish I had found and read it when it was first published (2004), or even better, when I started learning Chinese (1979).… (más)