Difficult Chinese characters are obstacles for everyone, not for non-Chinese
only. It is such a pity that it has not come up a new way to solve it since two thousands
ago.The simlification did not aim at this direction, while made necessary simplification but
also caused many damages in its narrowest sense.
The time is coming.The laureate is waiting.
Back to my earliest question: Is there any interest fact behind the order of the twelve animals Chinese used for their birth years? No reply has been made after almost two years. And there is further question to be put forth: Is there any more untold story behind the form of Chinese characters of it? Much easier to look at is how those characters describe numbers shaped.... How can one read these characters in a new insight in the guidance of I-Ching as well as many Chinese classics?
I'm afraid that my way will cause resistance more from Chinese than the rest of the people
of the world, for the seeming learned usually stopped there for seeking more of its seemly
aspects. But things are round, those who are arrogant will follow the steps of the rabbit
when racing with turtle, many examples tested this already.
So let's start this unprecedented journey.
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"Chinese characters evolved over time from earlier forms of hieroglyphs. The idea that all Chinese characters are either pictographs or ideographs is an erroneous one: most characters contain phonetic parts, and are composites of phonetic components and semantic radicals. Only the simplest characters, such as ren 人 (human), ri 日 (sun), shan 山 (mountain), shui 水 (water), may be wholly pictorial in origin.
"In 100 CE, the famed scholar Xú Shèn in the Hàn Dynasty classified characters into six categories, namely pictographs, simple ideographs, compound ideographs, phonetic loans, phonetic compounds and derivative characters. Of these, only 4% were categorized as pictographs, and 80–90% as phonetic complexes consisting of a semantic element that indicates meaning, and a phonetic element that indicates the pronunciation. There are about 214 radicals recognized in the Kangxi Dictionary.
"A well-educated Chinese reader today recognizes approximately 6,000-7,000 characters; approximately 3,000 characters are required to read a Mainland newspaper. The PRC government defines literacy amongst workers as a knowledge of 2,000 characters, though this would be only functional literacy. A large unabridged dictionary, like the Kangxi Dictionary, contains over 40,000 characters, including obscure, variant, rare, and archaic characters; fewer than a quarter of these characters are now commonly used."
