Chinese characters are written with ÒstrokesÓ of a brush. The HanABC system has classified these different types of strokes using 24 Roman letters. Anyone who knows the proper stroke writing order of a character and the HanABC stroke classification system can write the ÒRomanizationÓ of that character. Since the Roman alphabet has an established and well known order, HanABC has adopted this alphabetical order to sort Chinese information. This book includes the HanABC Romanizations for 14,515 Chinese characters.
HanABC does not require a person to know the traditional radical, the number of strokes or the phonetics of a character. HanABC requires minimal rules, while still efficiently encoding the entirety of Chinese characters. HanABC facilitates quick and easy search in a sorted list. Thus, HanABC would be very well suited to sort dictionaries and telephone books, to index any book, or even for typing Chinese at a computer keyboard.