A Handbook for Analyzing Chinese Characters

Book excerpt: With the fast growth of Chinese economy, the number of people learning Chinese language is increasing rapidly throughout the world. A Handbook for Analyzing Chinese Characters is intended to help those studying Chinese as a second language. It includes 5073 most frequently used Chinese characters in reading and writing. To help learners identify the most important to the least important characters, the 5073 characters are grouped into five different usage levels. Besides, they are formed with pictographic characters, self-indicative characters, compound ideographic characters and radical phonetic characters according to their structures. Each character is described with the property of the character and clarified by an illustrative sentence.Zhifang Ren is a professor of English at China Medical University. He has previously written a book titled A Handbook of Analyzing English Vocabulary published in China. This is his second literary endeavor involving ten years of painstaking research and compilation.