Understanding Chinese Characters by Their Ancestral Forms

The reader will discover that it takes little effort and imagination to understand the most common and widely used characters. Ping-gam Go provides a full-color photo survey of San Francisco s Chinatown and a dictionary of 288 Chinese characters, each entry contains the Mandarin and Cantonese pronunciations, ancestral pictograph, traditional Chinese character and English definition. Dozens of practice exercises and flashcards are provided to assist in memorization of the meanings of the signs in Chinatown.

Ping-gam Go, who descended from the Fukien province in China, was born in Java, Indonesia. He traveled abroad for his education, earning degrees in physics and mathematics from the University of Amsterdam and post-graduate degrees in geology from Imperial College of Science & Technology in London and Leyden University in Holland. Ping-gam Go worked for Elsevier Publishing Company in Amsterdam as a science editor on the English translations of all Nobel Prize lectures. The Nobel Foundation in Sweden recognized him for his work as editor and for his contributions to these translations.