Chinese Etymology 字源
Please donate so I can keep my research since 1994, and keep the information free without advertisements. 我从1994年开始自费研究古汉字. 请 捐款 , 这样我可以继续汉字研究, 持续免费提供这些内容, 并且没有广告干扰.
When I was a young man of 22 I decided I wanted to learn Chinese. I worked hard for a year and bought a one-way ticket to Taiwan in 1972 with the idea that I would become fluent and literate in Chinese. I was not a particularly good student in the early days and found myself at the age of 40 and not able to read Chinese.
I was still faced with the prospect of learning to write about 5,000 characters and 60,000 character combinations. The characters were complex with many strokes and almost no apparent logic.
I found on the rare occasions when I could get a step by step evolution of the character from its original pictographic form, with an explanation of its original meaning and an interpretation of its original pictographs, suddenly it would become apparent how all the strokes had come to be.
