The book describes some of the concepts underlying the Chinese language and writing system, and gives the author's position on a number of ideas about the language.

There is not a unique "Chinese language". There is a group of related ways of speaking, which some may call dialects, others call topolects (a calque of Chinese 方言, fāngyán; DeFrancis uses the term "regionalects"), and still others would regard as separate languages, many of which are not mutually intelligible. One such variant, based on the speech of the Beijing area, has been chosen as the standard language in the People's Republic of China, and is now known as "Putonghua", or common language.

The Chinese writing system has a heavy phonological basis, shown in the phonetic elements common in more than 95% of Chinese characters. Unfortunately they are missing from many common characters, and were removed from numerous "simplified" characters, causing many scholars to miss the point that they are a necessary resource for Chinese readers. It is not a brilliant ideographic script; it is a poor phonetic script.

Although there are characters in the Chinese writing system that visually represent concepts, such as 一 二 三 for one, two, and three, Chinese writing is not ideographic in the sense that the symbols represent ideas divorced from language. There can be no such thing as a completely ideographic writing system, where there would be symbols to stand for all possible individual concepts and where morphemes or phonemes would play no significant role in writing individual words. For instance, most Chinese words are written as phono-semantic compounds that include a non-ideographic, phonetic element.

The Chinese script, with its huge number of characters, its complexity and its irregularities, is harmful to the literacy improvement efforts of the Chinese society, and needs to be replaced by a more efficient writing system if China is to achieve the benefits of modernization.

John DeFrancis (August 31, 1911 – January 2, 2009) was an American linguist, sinologist, author of Chinese language textbooks, lexicographer of Chinese dictionaries, and Professor Emeritus of Chinese Studies at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa.