Illustrated Account of Chinese Characters (English and Chinese Edition)

Anyone learning Chinese will have to learn the characters first. The Chinese script is an ideographic writing system in which the form is related to the meaning directly. The characters in this book mostly have a high frequency of use. In terms of composition type, most of the characters are pictographs, indicatives and ideographs. A few phonetic compounds included are developments of earlier pictographs or ideographs. The emphasis of the approximate 670 words is on the revelation of the relation between the original meaning and the shape of the character, the extended and shifted meanings are mentioned in passing. There are common expressions at the end of some entries to deepen readers' understanding of the character concerned.