Chinese characters were not formed arbitrarily, despite (to a Western eye) their overall similarity yet bewildering multiplicity in detail. Over several thousands of years, early religious writers, court officials, scholars, poets, and eventually lexicographers created a body of material that shows a remarkable internal system. A few characters were originally pictographic; a few were arbitrary; but more were the result of combining phonetic elements with semantic features.
This situation is not simply a historical curiosity, however; it offers a potentially great help to the student who...