Fundamentals of Chinese Characters focuses on the connections between the shapes and meanings of basic Chinese characters, enabling students to learn to recognize and write Chinese characters before they learn to speak Chinese. Presenting fundamental knowledge of Chinese characters according to their intrinsic regularity rather than in the sequence often used in teaching spoken Chinese, this book enables teachers to offer students a course on Chinese characters alongside a Chinese language course at the elementary level. With interactive exercises, rhymes for all the characters covered in the book, and illustrations for all the basic characters, this book makes learning Chinese characters easy and fun.