At long last the approach that has helped thousands of learners memorize Japanese kanji has been adapted to help students with Chinese characters. The volumes of Remembering Simplified Hanzi are designed to help students learn the meaning and writing of the 3,000 most frequently used simplified Chinese characters. The parallel set of volumes Remembering Traditional Hanzi has been prepared for 3,000 traditional characters. Of critical importance to the approach found in both these volumes is the systematic arranging of characters in an order best suited to memorization. In the Chinese writing system, strokes and simple components are nested within relatively simple characters, which can, in turn, serve as parts of more complicated characters and so on. Taking advantage of this allows a logical ordering, making it possible for students to approach most new characters with prior knowledge that can greatly facilitate the learning process. Guidance and detailed instructions are provided along the way. Students are taught to employ "imaginative memory" to associate each character's component parts, or "primitive elements," with one another and with a key word that has been carefully selected to represent an important meaning of the character.

This is accomplished through the creation of a "story" that engagingly ties the primitive elements and key word together. In this way, the collections of dots, strokes, and components that make up the characters are associated in memorable fashion, dramatically shortening the time required for learning and helping to prevent characters from slipping out of memory.