Chinese Characters

by Nina Train Choa

Explore the history and meanings behind Chinese characters with this fascinating language book.
Language can give a tremendous insight into the culture of a nation. Chinese characters, with their strong pictorial aspect, provide a great source of revealing information regarding ancient Chinese civilization and its historical connection with contemporary Chinese writing. As you turn the pages, you will tour a carefully selected collection of Chinese characters in daily use, illustrated by beautiful ancient inscriptions as well as both simple and detailed explanations. From these you can gain a better understanding and appreciation of the evolution of Chinese characters and the culture embodied in them.
The Chinese characters in this book are a modest representation which gives a clue to the amazing relationship between their forms and meanings. Generally they fall into four categories: radicals, people or body parts, plants and nature as well as objects, all related to the simple aspects of daily life in ancient China.

Genres: Nonfiction

112 pages, Hardcover

First published October 10, 2010

Reviews

[Tara]

This was a nice character book, but it didn't offer any new incites into the characters. I've read a dozen similar books that tell how the character got its shape from ancient pictographs. What I'd really like to see is a book describing how the simplified character came about from the traditional character and why some characters don't have simplified forms.