About this eBook:

Many years of educational research unveiled a stunning fact: Chinese characters are traditionally introduced by their contextual meanings instead of their shape. And this considerably slowed down the language acquisition process. This course book offers a new approach to writing and learning Chinese characters (Hanzi in the Chinese language, Kanji in the Japanese language).

By arranging the Hanzi in small groups of similar shape on tracing sheets your learning performance will be increased. Our brain really loves motoric reinforcement while learning through writing practice. Little numbers attached to some strokes are explaining the correct stroke order and writing direction.

In contrast to all other educational resources the numbers will only be displayed where necessary as your feeling of the correct writing and stroke order will grow from page to page.

Readings (or pronunciation) are given in Mandarin romanization (Pinyin). Meanings of each Chinese character should be regarded as a description of a picture, as Hanzi are pictograms. This will help you to get a feeling of each character. Don't learn the Hanzi by heart, feel & understand them as you would do with other pictures and photos, too.

If you are totally new to the Chinese language, please make use of additional resources and concentrate on writing and meanings while using this course book.

Use only one line of the tracing sheet per Hanzi and training cycle - repeating of the readings and meanings of the Hanzi will help you to kill practice time :-)

If in doubt how to write a Hanzi please use your experience: When there is no number displayed, the stroke order and writing is as you have previously learned (assuming that you started this course book from the very beginning).

This course book introduces simplified Chinese characters as used in China and Singapore. 2 printed fonts of each Hanzi are displayed to help understand the small differences in their appearance especially when handwriting is concerned. In some cases traditional characters or derivations are added for your reference.

For more detailed information about each Hanzi please refer to ...

No big deal, no long explanations - just print out this eBook and get your (soft) pencils ready.

Please feel free to contact the author for feedback or to write a review - at least spread the word to help other students of the Japanese and Chinese language to save practice time.