After all, the ancient Chinese didn’t just “make them up” as they went along according to Sears. He wanted to grasp the “logic” and understand the origins. Sears obviously wasn’t satisfied with blindly memorizing characters or Chineasy-style mnemonics. (Just imagine a sociologist investing 30 years of his life into die-hard quantum mechanics research). “Uncle Hanzi” is an extremely interesting case, because he doesn’t come from the field of sinology and seems to be a lone wolf fueled by a hardcore obsession with Hanzi. At age 44 I had a near-fatal heart attack and after recovering, but not knowing when I might die, I decided I must get started.” At you can trace back the composition and meaning of almost any character to its origins as far as they are known. I started researching but did not get started actually doing it. In his own words: “ At age 40, I got the idea that I needed to computerize the origins of Chinese characters so that I could sort out the crap from the truth. ![]() He created an online database of more than 96.000 ancient Chinese characters called. “Uncle Hanzi” is the nickname of Richard Sears, an American physicist, who has been obsessed with the origin and history of Chinese characters for most of his life. That means caring about their origin and history. Instead, we should try to get the characters “right”. In the long run though, we shouldn’t stick with random images and stories. Obsessed with the origin and history of Chinese characters Yes, Chineasy’s approach is quite random at large and disregards the composition and history of the character, but applying some form of visual mnemonics is much more effective than blindly memorizing meaning and stroke order, especially when you’ve just started out. It all boils down to this: Chinese characters have to make sense when you learn them. Associating a certain image with a character or its individual components makes memorizing Hanzi less of a struggle. That being said, the visual approach exemplified by Chineasy can be useful. It reaches its limits pretty soon though. It’s not a system, it’s rather a learning technique put into practice.
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