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吏 [lì] another bound form, meaning (government) official or officer, as in 官吏 [guānlì].

更 [gèng] adverb meaning more, as in 更多 [gèngduō]

使 [shǐ] make or cause to, as in 听音乐史我睡觉 (Listening to music puts me to sleep); also use or apply, as in 使用 [shǐyòng]

便 [biàn] convenient, as in 方便 [fāngbiàn]; also [pián] as in 便宜 [piányi] cheap

Reference

List of easily confused Chinese characters on Wikipedia.

The entire book is written using only the following 300 (simplified) characters:

一又二十七了人八九三已己下工子才大小上也山千女火六文方心王天夫五太友不少以日比水中今分父月手毛半必平打可正去本左右北叫四出外母生用句白他字忙次衣有百在西老再地早因吃回名多年先自件好行没完弟快忘那车更把找走见吧别男坐告我每位住你但作近河法定怪怕房放夜底刻长玩表事东两直来奇到呢门明易些念朋知儿的所姓往洗送差美前穿客为屋孩城要南什是昨思怎拜看信便很后酒家容站这高病书哥起真校时哭茶笑拿能气们个候条纸着情许张现教带常问晚唱国第够鱼进船得从道诉就画报喜都极棹黑最开喝贵跑过菜买饭笔等然短给几街新意话里远块想当睡跟路万岁爱会经慢说认么歌紧对算写请谁卖样数铺懂亲办头还馆错钱学谢礼应帮点脸识离坏听愿关欢旧难钟觉边

New, expanded editions are now available with either simplified or traditional characters.

Download: List of Modern Chinese Radicals (PDF, excerpted from TPS Frequency Dictionary of Mandarin Chinese)

Download: Modern Radicals One Page Quick Reference (PDF)

Download: Pinyin Quick Reference (PDF)

The dictionary contains a total of 26,704 entries of between one and four characters in length. Each entry appears in one of 2,500 character sections, arranged according to character frequency. Within each character section, words are listed in frequency order and grouped in numbered sections from 1 through 5, meant to give a general sense of how common the words are: group 1 words are the most common, while group 5 words are relatively rare. The character section in which a particular entry appears–all entries appear only once–has been determined by the least common component character. For example, the common compound 以后 is not listed with character #18 (以) but rather with #59 (后). This three-way ordering and filtering technique is what I call the “Triple Progression System.”

The character and word data used to build the word list are derived from Jun Da’s Chinese Text Computing website, and in particular the character and word frequency distribution data related to a news and information based subcorpus of modern Mandarin Chinese. In order to eliminate nonsense character combinations and other frequently occurring non-words, the CC-CEDICT Chinese-English dictionary was used to validate the data. Words and phrases not appearing in CC-CEDICT were excluded. (However, some high frequency non-word collocations that also happen to be low frequency words, such as 比亚, do appear in the list.)

In all, 152,688 bigrams, trigrams, and guadrigrams were processed using a Perl script that compared them with a list of the top 2,500 characters and the CC-CEDICT dictionary. The resulting list contains a total of 26,704 entries (2,500 single character, 20,294 bigrams, 999 trigrams, and 2,911 quadrigrams).

There are 42 character sections that do not include any word entries. Of these 42 characters, 14 appear in entries elsewhere in the dictionary. The other 28 characters do not appear anywhere in the dictionary.

The words accompanying each character section have been grouped into levels according to word frequency. Jun Da suggests three frequency (X) ranges (or “stages”): very low (X≤5), medium-low to low (550) for the acquisition of new vocabulary by foreign learners of Chinese. For this project, the lowest frequency range has been eliminated, and the top range has been split up, resulting in a total of five ranges, or groups, as follows:

(1) 1,000 ≤ X             1,495 words (most common)
(2)   250 ≤ X < 1,000     2,979 words
(3)   100 ≤ X <   250     3,251 words
(4)    50 ≤ X <   100     3,037 words
(5)     5 ≤ X <    50    13,442 words (least common)

This arrangement results in the smallest number of words at level one (the most common words), relatively uniform distribution over levels two through four, and a sizable group of the least common words at level five.

For more information and free downloads, please visit the TPS Frequency Dictionary of Mandarin Chinese product information page.