A Dictionary of the 3,500 Most Frequently Used Chinese Characters: Their Romanized Transcription in Hanyu Pinyi,. with English Meaning Definition, and Their Stroke Order. A Reference Manual

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Preface and Introduction:
This book is reference manual for the most frequently used Chinese characters and is an enlarged English version of my German Kleines Lexikon chinesischer Schriftzeichen [SMALL LEXICON OF CHINESE CHARACTERS] that only covers 1475 Chinese characters but includes both simplified and tradiitonal character forms of the entries covered, some historical-cultural comments on a number of selected character entries. It was published by Viademica Publishers (Berlin 2012, ISBN 978-3-939290-29-2). This edition covers only the simplified forms of Chinese characters as it is intended for Western learners of Chinese studying Chinese with a view to eventually sitting for any of the six levels of the Chinese Language Proficiency Exam (HSK) in the People's Republic of China. Traditional character equivalents can be looked up in widely available Chinese character dictionaries like the Xinhuá Zìdian [CHARACTER DICTIONARY OF THE NEW CHINA], and as they are not required for this Chinese language proficiency exam, they will not be included here so that the user can concentrate on character forms that really matter without bothering about their traditional character variant forms if they exist. Note that not all Chinese characters have simplified and corresponding traditional forms; in many cases, the forms are actually the same. The Chinese script structurally is not based on phonetical principles like the Roman script. It has an ideographical principle instead, which means a Chinese character conveys an idea, a concept, and roughly spoken, the meaning of a word like sun, bird, etc. It's like drawing a sun to convey ist meaning in written form. There are various structural principles by which the meaning of Chinese characters is conveyed, not only the picture-drawing principle. We cannot go into further detail regarding such structural principles here. Let it suffice to state that because Chinese characters are based on ideographical principle, they

Born in 1950, Dr. Schmidt has been a university professor in Applied Linguistics at several reputable universities in Poland, Hungary, China, Korea, Morocco, Namibia and Kenya. He graduated with a Master Degree in Linguistics from Free Berlin University in 1981 and with a PhD in Chinese (Sinology) in 1986. Schmidt has published extensively with over 20 books and numerous articles to his credit. His other degrees include majors in Traditional Chinese Medicine, Theology and Comparative Religion from reputable universities in China and the USA. Schmidt has been the founder and president of various schools and colleges worldwide until his retirement in July 2015. He is well-known for his annotated translation of ancient Chinese medical classics on Acupuncture, the Yellow Emperor's Classic of Internal Medicine and the Classic of Difficult Questions in a single volume (ISBN 978-3-939290-81-0) with an extensive footnote apparatus. His translations of these texts were the first to be ever published in German.