Learning Chinese is very probably the most rewarding single investment that a student of East Asian medicine can make. A knowledge of Chinese provides access to the knowledge and experience of East Asian physicians over a period of two thousand years. By learning Chinese, one gains entry into a library of information a thousand times larger than any that exists in English or any other Western language. One gains the ability to communicate with Chinese physicians in their own language and to share their knowledge and experience. Ultimately, one gains the ability to think in the language that has been used by generations of Chinese doctors and scholars to record their experiences and considerations about traditional Chinese medicine. The great stability of the written language means that the modern student of Chinese medicine has relatively easy access to the literature of the past. And of course the English-speaking student embarking on the task of learning Chinese can similarly gain access to the literature of the past as well as the present. The continuing importance of the classical literature of antiquity requires students to be conversant with classical as well as modern Chinese. The continuity of the written language means merely having to learn different forms of the same language rather than distinct languages.

The investment required to learn Chinese may have been exaggerated in the past. Unlike other European languages such as French or Italian, Chinese has its own script, which is known to be highly complex. It is less widely known that the grammar of Chinese is infinitely much simpler than most European languages, and it has a basic structure similar to that of English. Though the script is difficult to learn, the number of characters that one has to learn for the purposes of gaining access to East Asian medical literature is astoundingly low. The current text presents the first 100 characters based upon frequency of use in medical texts, as well as an overall program designed to help the student acquire the necessary tools for building a thorough vocabulary. This first volume (in a series of five) presents the basics of Chinese characters along with the etymologies of the 100 most commonly seen characters. Designed as a workbook, it offers students practice in learning to read, recognize, and write the characters and provides the basic tools that students need to become familiar with the written language of Chinese medicine and thereby enrich their studies.

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• Medical Books