"Easy Learning: Chinese Characters" is designed for English speakers or anyone who has a good command of the English language. Unlike Chinese speakers, English speakers are used to a phonetic writing system, that is-"what they read is what they hear". When they see an English word, they expect its letters to tell them the pronunciation and recognize its meaning. Thus English speakers find Chinese characters to be too complicated and confusing because they cannot pronounce them easily. Without a phonetic system, they have to find the pronunciations through pinyin and then find the meaning. Therefore, English speakers think they need extra time to learn to connect the graphic shapes of Chinese characters with their pronunciation. So learning the Chinese language can seem like learning two different languages: one for listening and speaking, and the other for reading and writing. However, if you can master the methods of learning Chinese characters in this book, you will get twice the results with half the effort! "Easy Learning: Chinese Characters" can make your Chinese character learning process easy and fun! It is intended to be an intensive course book for English speakers who have just started to learn Chinese writing. Anyone who has pinyin as a foundation can study this book by themselves. This book has 86 lessons in total with detailed explanations of 550 basic Chinese characters and over 2400 Chinese words and phrases. This gives learners the foundation from which they can expand to read the 4000 basic Chinese characters. With basic knowledge of the evolutionary history of Chinese characters, learners will gain a brand new perspective and profound understanding during the learning process. Over 90% of the characters in "Easy Learning: Chinese Characters" are accompanied with pictures showing how the character evolved from its original shape to its current simplified form. Only less than 1% of the characters in this book may need to be memorized mechanically but even they are provided with vivid pictures to help remember them. All of the characters, words and phrases are provided with detailed pronunciation in pinyin. So all the lessons taught in this book should be easily mastered by new learners. All languages are connected. Chinese is similar to English in numerous ways. Pictophonetic characters make up over 90% of all Chinese characters. By mastering the rules of pictophonetic characters, one can read most of the characters. Chinese radicals (the part of a Chinese character which represents its meaning) are like English monograms. Monograms represent the meaning of words, for example, words containing "astro" are mostly related to stars. "Easy Learning: Chinese Characters" focuses on teaching you to master basic character forms including pictographic characters, self-explanatory characters and ideographic characters. These make up the foundation of all characters. This book references several Chinese language sources in order to provide precise and detailed explanations of each character. These sources include: The Contemporary Chinese Dictionary, Advanced Chinese Characters Dictionary, Kangxi Dictionary and Shuowen Jiezi-Explaining Simple and Analyzing Compound Characters. With the help of "Easy Learning: Chinese Characters", learners will have the confidence to master Chinese reading and writing in a relatively short period of time.