Chinese Characters for Internet Users: How to Recognize and Memorize Simplified Chinese Characters in a Super Simplified Way- FLASH CARDS, Part One - first 100 simplified characters

The Super Simplified Way is based on:

- Teaching only what Internet users really need to know
- Not teaching overwhelming stroke order and count
- Color visualization of each character's component
- Putting together familiar components

You are about to start learning from the book “Chinese Characters for Internet Users.” Congratulations! Part One of this super-simplified program consists of the first 100 characters, their variants and other related characters. Of course, knowing one hundred characters isn’t enough to read and understand the whole content of Chinese web pages. This book is rather to encourage readers by showing that, by using the right learning method, anybody who is willing can start learning Chinese characters today.

No book can ever make the learning of Chinese characters easy. There are about 3,000 characters needed just to read Chinese newspapers and web content. It can takes years of commitment for the foreigner to memorize enough to become proficient in Chinese. That is why there is the need for good teaching methods to seed up the learning process. Typical Chinese character textbooks teach students to memorize the character by its look, the radical (stem) of the character, and the number and writing order of the strokes. Different systems use different number of radicals, but it is always overwhelming to memorize which one of about 200 radicals belongs to a specific character.

On the other hand, this book’s super-simplified manner of learning the characters dwells only on their appearance, with the rest of the attributes omitted. While the memorization of radicals and number of strokes may still be useful for somebody who needs to look up it up in a paper dictionary, it is different for the Internet user, who can simply copy the character from the Web page and paste it into one of the numerous online dictionaries. Such needless memorizing represents a huge effort that only slows the learning down.

Mastering stroke order is necessary for legible handwriting and calligraphy; but in our modern time, when almost all writing takes place using computers, it can be overcome through the use of numerous Chinese input scripts. Since recognition and memorization of Chinese characters is the main goal of this book, the discussion of various input methods is beyond its scope.

The Formation of Chinese Characters the Super-Simplified Way

As aforementioned, a character’s look and its use in the context are all that matter in this textbook. New characters are taught with the help of a limited number of very essential radicals - twelve of them - and by breaking down the character to its most basic, familiar components.

For example, the character for one is a single horizontal stroke ( 一 ), while the character for person ( 人 ) is made up of two parts, the “left sabre” ( 丿) and the “right sabre” ( 乀 ). Finally, the structure of following character, big ( 大 ), can be viewed as a combination of these already-known characters, one and person ( 一 + 人 = 大 ). In other words, each Chinese character, with the help of a little imagination, can be seen as a combination of basic building parts - the essential radicals and the other characters. In our next example, the character for win ( 赢 ) is a composite of two essential radicals (一 + 口 ) and four “pre-assembled” characters (亠 + 月 + 贝 + 几), plus some extra minor strokes.

These ‘minor strokes’ are necessary to mention, since writing Chinese characters isn’t an exact science; it is not possible to assemble all characters purely using other characters used in the Chinese writing system. In this case, that “little imagination” mentioned earlier has to fill in the blanks.

As stated at the beginning, learning Chinese characters is never going to be easy. It takes commitment, but with enough available studying time and imagination, it’s possible to learn them well.