Sinographs 101 · Foundations

The first course of the sinograph school. No prerequisites. By the end you will know how the characters work as a writing system — strokes, components, and the ways a character can mean — own a first inventory of real characters, and read genuine lines of the classical written language they were made for.

This school takes the classical road: the characters are taught on the texts they wrote for their first two thousand years, not on modern newspaper vocabulary. If what you want is modern Chinese or Japanese, excellent tools already exist and the Reference will point you to them; what this course gives you is the older, longer story those tools skip — and everything you learn here counts toward the modern languages too, because the characters are the same.

Chapters

0. Orientation — what this course is; the growing picture, heaven to earth to king
1. The order of strokes — the numbers in one breath, and the pointing marks
2. The world in pictures — sun, moon, mountain, water, tree, mouth
3. The master says — 子child · zǐ · child, son; the Master; a title of respect曰say · yuē · to say — the quotation-opener of the classical books, and the first compounds built from what you own
4. Roots, tips, and borrowed sounds — marks on the tree; the move that built the script
5. The busiest words — of, not, indeed: the top of the frequency table
6. Knowing and walking — the arrow of knowing, the borrowed beard, speech
7. Doing and being — the elephant, the dancer, the halberd; wu wei opens
8. Stopping at true — the footprint chain to "this"; names set upright
9. The master's opening — who, its, also, really: the first sentence in reach
10. Reference — every character taught, the conventions, and where to go next

The course is complete. Ten chapters and a reference: how the characters work, from the first stroke to the master’s opening sentence — 55 characters, one of every five on a classical page, and every way a character can mean. The reading itself continues in 102 · Literary Chinese, where the grammar of the classical language takes over.