Student's Handbook of Chinese Character Diagrammatic Speed Notation

Author: Li Shuxin
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2006-11-01
Features: The greatest characteristic of Chinese characters is their profound connotation and square shape. "When Cangjie first created writing, he modeled it after shapes, so it was called 'wen' (text). Later, when form and sound complemented each other, it was called 'zi' (character)." From this, we can see that Chinese characters belong to a descriptive lexical system, with a fundamental difference from Western language systems like English and French. It is precisely because of this feature that Chinese is considered the most profound, complex, and difficult language to master in the world. Especially the similar-looking characters in Chinese have become a recognized difficulty in learning the language. For example, "xiu" (rest) and "ti" (body), "yao" (must) and "shua" (play), "wu" (noon) and "niu" (cow), "zhé" (bend) and "chai" (take apart), "mian" (avoid) and "tu" (rabbit), etc. These similar characters are very easy to misread, miswrite, and misuse. Especially for Chinese students in primary and secondary schools in China and Chinese beginners abroad, they often make confusing and incorrect usage in practice. For instance, some mistakenly use "lang" (wolf) and "niang" (mother), leading to humorous situations. To address this phenomenon, the authors have summarized a set of methods for learning Chinese characters based on years of teaching experience. Following this method, readers can quickly and effectively, effortlessly, master a large number of characters, achieving twice the result with half the effort. This book organizes 923 geometric "modules" based on the methods of character creation, structural forms, and phonetic characteristics of Chinese characters, and includes a total of 4,418 commonly used characters. The character headers are printed in large font, with geometric shapes and arrows indicating them. The notes next to the character headers include the Chinese pinyin, definitions, and example words. The pronunciation is based on the phonetic system of Mandarin Chinese, using Pinyin letters for annotation. For characters with multiple pronunciations, the pronunciations are noted within the definitions. Except where space permits, the definitions under the Pinyin in the definitions are generally omitted, with only example words listed. This book provides a "Pinyin Index" for retrieval. Common characters not included in the "modules" are compiled as an appendix after the main text for supplementation.