Description
This book is designed to offer the reader clues for remembering and making sense of more than 1,000 Chinese characters (hanzi). The drawings and brief descriptions are somewhat based on historical radicals and meanings, though they sometimes vary wildly from their historical roots. They are designed to provide mnemonic devices to help you understand and get to know the characters.
To memorize Chinese characters, it is helpful to know some history. Chinese characters are considered one of the oldest consistently used writing systems in the world. Though we know that Chinese people have used characters to write for well over 3,000 years, these symbols were not codified into a more orderly system of writing until Emperor Qin Shi Huangdi came into power in 221 B.C. Then the writing system became a means of unifying the vast Middle Kingdom.
Today, simplified characters are used in China and Singapore, although traditional characters are still used in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Macao. Chinese characters have been adapted for use in the writing systems of Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese as well.
ISBN:9780804843850
