A Revolutionary Approach In Learning Chinese

Can you imagine that a student can learn chemistry well without knowing the periodic table? If Chinese characters are considered as the chemical compounds, the radicals are the elements in the periodic table. With two hundred radicals, thousands of characters can be constructed. This is the first book teaching Chinese with the radicals in a systematic way, which is proved much more interesting and efficient. Unlike most languages in the world, Chinese is a visual language. Homophones are very common, and one pronunciation often corresponds to tens of different characters. Without a comprehensive knowledge of Chinese characters, it is impossible to learn the language well. Therefore, it is better to learn the meanings of Chinese characters first, instead of learning the spoken language at the beginning. Oriental philosophy is closely related to Chinese characters, which was adopted by Korea and Japan in ancient times. This book shows the hidden connections among these characters, and one can find that such a network of concepts is very different from that in western languages. Therefore, in order to get a deep understanding of Chinese culture, one needs to know how phenomena are perceived and described, which is reflected in the configuration of Chinese characters.

Dr. Yumin Zhang has a strong interest in the evolution of Chinese characters, and he served as the principal in a Chinese school in Oklahoma a few years ago. He found that it is very helpful to learn Chinese by means of their radicals, in this way seemingly unrelated characters are well organized into families.