Author Description

Are you ready to unlock the secrets of the world's oldest writing system, the world's first civilization, and the world's most popular language? With Hanzi Gong's Shuangfa Method, you'll learn to read and speak Chinese, understanding what the characters really mean and how the characters are combined to form other characters. You can read Chinese! Chinese started out as pictograms: pictures of literal objects. These pictures however became stylized and standardized and simplified to make writing easier. The pictures and symbols of the simplest characters are then combined and recombined to form pictophonetic characters which have have at least a phonetic sound key and a semantic key. Chinese characters are a grand puzzle and real joy because each character has an inner logic that conveys its meaning. Chinese is basically sight reading by syllables, and once you understand to start with the pictograms and that the phonetic clues are syllables not letters it becomes a wonderful adventure! This is how you learn Chinese Characters: First, you learn the pictograms, which are pictures of literal objects. Second you learn the ideograms, which are symbols of abstract concepts. Third you learn the combined concept characters, where two characters are combined to express a third concept common to both. All these are by sight reading, they are not phonetic. Finally, you learn the pictophonetic characters, which combine at least a phonetic clue with a semantic key. The most frequently used Chinese characters are simple pictograms, ideograms, and combined concept characters. A much greater number of Chinese characters, which are however much less frequently used, are pictophonetic characters, which are composed of simple ideograms, pictograms. You can't learn or understand pictophonetic characters until you've learned the pictograms, ideograms, and combi