Chinese character types

Chinese characters look the same to us Westerners in the sense that they all seem equally complicated, but when we look closer, we find that there are actually many structurally different types of Chinese characters. Some of them are really pictures of whatever they represent, so for instance 人 'person' is really a picture of a person and 女 'woman' is really a picture of a woman. 

Then there are other types of Chinese characters, much more abstract and much more complicated, with fancy names like the phono-semantic compounds or derived characters and I would like to introduce them to you one by one. 

This series of articles will be an end result of a project which I have been working on for over three and a half years. I will be publishing a book on Chinese characters and wanted to give you a glimpse of what will be inside as well ask you for any comments or suggestions you might have to make the book as enjoyable and useful as possible. 

In line with my philosophy of minimalism and effectivisim, the book will be very clean and easy to use, combining the absolutely best modern Chinese character research with the best learner experience. 

A lot of time and effort has been put into transforming the complicated research data into easy to understand 'look once, understand immediately' chunks. No clutter, or lumping of information onto the reader. Just an enjoyable learning experience.

For more information and regular updates about this and my other projects feel free to subscribe to my mailing list. 

Learn more about:
Pictograms
Compound pictograms