The Character Book, which can be used in either Simplified or Traditional courses, provides the Chinese characters for the core vocabulary in every lesson to help students practice their writing skills. It shows the following for each character:

1.                Character with its stroke order indicated by numbers

2.                Traditional form of the character

3.                Simplified form of the character

4.                Pinyin pronunciation, grammatical usage, and sample sentences or phrases

5.                Stroke order illustrated by writing the character progressively

6.                Radical of the character with its Pinyin pronunciation and meaning

7.                Dotted graph lines to aid students’ practice

Blank boxes are also included for students to practice writing the character. As a handy reference, three types of indices are provided in the Character Book: (1) By number of strokes; (2) By Lesson number; (3) Alphabetic by Pinyin and a list of Common Radicals.