Remembering simplified Hanzi. Book 1 how not to forget the meaning and writing of Chinese characters& Book 2

This eBook includes the content of both "Remembering Simplified Hanzi 1" and "Remembering Simplified Hanzi 2", both of which are available in print. The 55 lessons from Book 1 cover the 1,000 most commonly used characters in the Chinese writing system, plus another 500 included either because they are needed to preserve the logical ordering of the material or because they are especially easy to learn at this early stage. The lessons from Book 2 add another 1,500 characters. Together, they comprise 3,000 characters — all of them selected on the basis of the frequency with which they appear in written Chinese. More will be said later in this Introduction about how you can use the two sets of lessons in this course, either sequentially or simultaneously. At long last the approach that has helped thousands of learners memorize Japanese kanji has been adapted to help students with Chinese characters. Book 1 of Remembering Simplified Hanzi covers the writing and meaning of the 1,000 most commonly used characters in the simplified Chinese writing system, plus another 500 that are best learned at an early stage. (Book 2 adds another 1,500 characters for a total of 3,000.) Of critical importance to the approach found in these pages is the systematic arranging of characters in an order best suited to memorization. In the Chinese writing system, strokes and simple components are nested within relatively simple characters, which can, in turn, serve as parts of more complicated characters and so on. Taking advantage of this allows a logical ordering, making it possible for students to approach most new characters with prior knowledge that can greatly facilitate the learning process. Guidance and detailed instructions are provided along the way. Students are taught to employ "imaginative memory" to associate each characters component parts, or "primitive elements," with one another and with a key word that has been carefully selected to represent an important meaning of the character. This is accomplished through the creation of a "story" that engagingly ties the primitive elements and key word together. In this way, the collections of dots, strokes, and components that make up the characters are associated in memorable fashion, dramatically shortening the time required for learning and helping to prevent characters from slipping out of memory. James W. Heisig, Timothy W. Richardson. Includes Bibliographical References And Indexes.