His interest in Chinese language and characters dates from 1972, when Richard Sears, was a 22-year-old physics major at Portland State University in Oregon. To Sears, the characters were complex with many strokes(笔画) and almost no apparent logic. But when he could get an explanation of a Chinese character's original meaning and an interpretation of its pictographs(象形文字), it would suddenly become apparent how all the strokes had come to be. "I'm a physicist, so I don't like blind memorization. I knew that Chinese characters came from pictographs and I wanted to know the stories behind the Chinese characters. "
As he studied, Sears found that many of the explanations were conflicting and even the experts were at odds. He decided to computerize the characters, so that he could separate good opinions from bad ones. He scanned about 96, 000 ancient characters and established the database of them.
In 2002 he got his website up and named it Chinese Etymology, where visitors can check for free the development of Chinese characters in various forms, from the original pictographs to the modern simplified forms. The clicks to the website went up to 600, 000 in one day. Overnight he became American Uncle Hanzi, a nickname(绰号) given by Chinese netizens.
Besides, he has explained the origin of 15, 000 modern characters. For example, the character jia (home) has a rooftop and a pig underneath. In southern China where it rains a lot, people put their houses on stilts(木桩), so if it flooded, the inside of the house would not get wet. So, the pigs live underneath the house.
Last year, Sears set up his studio in Nanjing that focuses on applying AR, animation(动画) and artificial intelligence to tell stories of Chinese culture and character origins. He has made over 60 such videos in English with Chinese subtitles for Bilibili, a video website. "They have both entertainment and educational value, " he says.
In the meantime, Sears has been updating the database. "My philosophy is huo dao lao xue dao lao. "
