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.