Anyone learning to read and write Chinese knows that it takes lots of practice! This practical guide includes a broad range of drills and exercises designed to dramatically enhance your proficiency in reading and writing Chinese. It can be used together with any Chinese textbook or teaching program to hone your Chinese reading and writing language skills. Hundreds of exercises in this book help teach beginning learners the basic components of the characters, including radicals and phonetic elements. Special exercises help you distinguish confusing "look-alikes" and teach you how to transcribe Pinyin romanized forms into characters and vice versa, how to add tone marks to the characters, how to identify characters with the same or similar pronunciation, or characters with closely-related meanings, and how to punctuate Chinese sentences. Character practice sheets give stroke-by-stroke instructions for writing each character in both simplified and traditional forms and teach you how to write the 600 basic characters. Writing exercises provided in this book include the following: Rearranging words into meaningful sentences Dialog completion and fill-in-the-blank exercises Answering simple questions based on reading passages Completing tasks based on reading schedules, maps, and road signs Translation of individual English terms and phrases into Chinese Transformation exercises (changing statements into questions, negatives, etc.) Guided composition for simple essays, letters, notes, and filling out forms Correcting passages with mistakes and converting conversations into narratives Changing informal spoken statements into a more formal written style