The Hanmoji Handbook: Your Guide to the Chinese Language Through Emoji

by An Xiao Mina

Learn Chinese with a new twist! This full-color illustrated handbook introduces and explains Han characters and idioms through the language of emoji.Even though their dates of origin are millennia apart, the languages of Chinese and emoji share similarities that the average smartphone user might find surprising. These “hanmoji” parallels offer an exciting new way to learn Chinese—and a fascinating window into the evolution of Chinese Han characters. Packed with fun illustrations and engaging descriptions, The Hanmoji Handbook brings to life the ongoing dialogue between the visual elements of Chinese characters and the language of emoji. At once entertaining and educational, this unique volume holds sure appeal for readers who use emojis, anyone interested in learning Chinese, and those who love quirky, visual gift books.

Genres: Nonfiction, Language, China

160 pages, Hardcover

First published August 30, 2022

About the author

An Xiao Mina is a technologist, writer, and artist whose work has been featured in the New York Times, the Economist, the Atlantic, and Hyperallergic. She was a research fellow at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University, and she works at the technology nonprofit Meedan. The author of Memes to Movements, she splits her time between New York and California.

Reviews

[Dana · Rating 4 out of 5]

I love u emojis 🩷🐉🥺🕴️🐘🛸😵‍💫🦨✨🧶🐦‍⬛🥰💾🫨🪲🧜

[Li Or · Rating 4 out of 5]

First thing's first: This book is not a classic "learn to read, write and speak Chinese" textbook. It doesn't teach practical words and phrases like greetings or how to order food at a restaurant. It's more of a basic intro to understanding the Chinese language through words that explain the concepts of the language. It's also a textbook about the history of Chinese language, and parallelling that with the history of Emoji (since both Chinese and Emoji are picture-based languages).

The book teaches some Chinese characters and a handful of words (the main one-character words taught are: wood, water, metal, fire, earth, sheep, door, mouth, fish, person, man, woman, child, pig).

It also demonstrates how characters grouped together to form new words (eg ocean, ask, fresh, inflammation, flames, forest, dark, weak, burn, follow, crowd, good, twins, peace, home, marry - and more.).

As much as it teaches Chinese words, this book also teaches in equal amounts about the history and nature of the Chinese language.

It teaches about:
- What logographic languages are
- the difference between simplified Chinese and traditional Chinese
- the tonal nature of the language
- what radicals are and how they are used to construct words
- The Five Elements
- History of Chinese writing
- History of Emoji & emoticons
- Some etymology of Chinese and English words
- Some Chinese idioms

Overall, this textbook gives a good foundation before starting to learn practical Chinese to give some understanding of important basic principles of the language. I found it to be a really interesting, approachable, enjoyable read for a subject that has previously felt intimidating and complicated. It presented it in a friendly, easy-to-understand way which I really appreciated.

[Anna · Rating 5 out of 5]

What a very cool concept and very well presented! Clear, concise, and above all fun! Love etymology and as I've been learning Japanese for a while, having more of the history of Chinese characters which are used across East Asia was great! It's a very cool concept to use the language of emoji to explain Chinese characters and how their smaller radicals are put together to create thousands of logograms.

[American Mensa · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Hanmoji Handbook is a book that introduces its readers to basic traditional and simplified Chinese. It teaches linguistic concepts such as radicals and tonal languages (English, in a way, has radicals too- graph, ed, dem, logy, bio, ing…). This book, for some reason, actually makes learning a new language fun! (Surprising fact: 70% of languages are tonal!)

Have you heard of emoticons or kaomoji? Emoticons are little faces made using punctuation (for example, “:-)”), and kaomoji are right-side-up emoticons made using Japanese symbols (for example, “V°•°V” for dog). I like the kaomoji. One that is pretty funny is w(°o°)w! The “sunglasses” face is awesome (¬■ _■ ). I have already thought of my own penguin kaomoji. (°v°) (The body can be added below it: /(ww)\; to make it wink or sleep, do (^v°) or
(-v-), respectively.)

Many emoji resemble Chinese characters that mean the same thing (🌲/木/mù/muk6, 🔥/火/huǒ/fo2, 🧍/人/rén/jan4, ⛰/山/shān/saan1). The characters for bed and bright are interesting, and the “people mountain, people sea” (rén shān rén hǎi) illustration is funny. The Chinese symbols for “tree” and “water” from 1600 BC look more like their meaning to me than the modern Chinese characters 木 and 水.

The Hanmoji Handbook contains pronunciations in Mandarin and Cantonese. The Chinese word for “middle”, when spelled using Pinyin, looks like an onomatopoeia. Zhōng! So does “crowd”- Zhòng!
This excellent, funny, informative book is for anyone over 8 who does not speak Chinese. Now that I have “painted a dragon dot in the eyes,” I can say, “bye bye!” or “拜拜/bái bái”!

Review by Amos G., 10, Piedmont Area Mensa

[Becs · Rating 3 out of 5]

Five stars for creativity - absolutely! This book is full colour, hugely entertaining and links beginning to write in Chinese with fun emojis - many of which I hadn't actually seen before. Did I learn any Chinese? No, probably not. But I had a great time reading it regardless.

I think the stories behind the language are the highlight of this book, alongside the aforementioned emojis. There has been some hugely creative thought behind the design of this book, and for those wishing to learn Chinese, or at the very least to find ways to remember how to write basic terms in Chinese, this is a great place to start.

Ultimately, learning how to speak, listen to, read or write in any language is difficult, so it's great to see a fun way to engage with that.

ARC provided by the publishers in exchange for an honest review.

[Lisa Van Gemert | Gifted Guru · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is super fun. I highly recommend it for gifted kids who can be obsessed with how things work. I love the way it connects Chinese characters with emoji, making the hanji so accessible. There are some excellent explanations of the way languages evolve, too, making this a lovely introduction to linguistics.

This would be a great addition to a classroom library, and it's also a great gift book.

*Note: The publisher provided a copy of the book to me in exchange for an honest review.

[Claire Binkley · Rating 4 out of 5]

The lack of a star is from how I just didn't understand what they were talking about, as I am just waking up now.

The oracle bone inscriptions page looks like something I have gone to several UPenn lectures about in the past! It looks like hanzi have diverged from the other kinds of ancient scripts such as Hindi and Roman letters which I am using to write this review in back then.

It points out that many simplified and traditional characters are the same.

[Jenn · Rating 5 out of 5]

I won a copy of this book.

I would consider this a good introduction to Chinese characters through the usage of emoji. The book should look fabulous in color (mine was an ARC)! Sure to engage readers of all ages, I'd say for the 10 and up crowd, but could be used with younger children if parents are up for answering questions.

[Jacob · Rating 5 out of 5]

Saw it in the school library immediately was drawn to it! Read it in one sitting today. Although it is formatted much like a kids book, it provides valuable insights on the future, change in language, and the correlation between emojis and 中文 describing them as 汉moji. Very fun sort of informational read and a great way to start off my long weekend! 非常有趣！

[Becky H · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book was such an interesting and fun read! I learned so much about the chinese language and culture as well as the very neat history of emojis. This book is a very fun way to learn how to write in Chinese and im inspired to start utilizing emojis much more often when I text going forward!

[Ralique · Rating 4 out of 5]

lots of general knowledge & history but not meant to be used as resource for learning chinese - doesn't introduce that many characters

[Randy · Rating 3 out of 5]

There is a lot to decipher in this book that introduces the reader to the world of emoji and the connection to Hanmoji and Chinese languages.

[Alexander · Rating 5 out of 5]

Thanks

[alyssa · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was such a neat way to show the history of the Chinese language, as well as breaking down separate language groups, linguistic rules, and how you can understand the way Chinese has worked.

[OK · Rating 2 out of 5]

Um this was disappointingly basic? Half of the images are just stock photos with emojis superimposed. Idk what I expected but it def wasn’t this.

[Jack Kämpfer · Rating 4 out of 5]

7/10

[Son Sitthavee · Rating 5 out of 5]

Some how, I really like the book. It’s very creative and teach Chinese characters in the fun way. Highly recommended for anyone 学习中文