Uncle Hanzi visiting the Ningbo museum in East China's Zhejiang province. [Photo by Ruan Fan/chinadaily.com.cn]

A new book coming soon

Currently, Sears is working on his new book, which is a compilation work from the database of Chinese characters he's created in the past twenty years.

"Previously, my work was building a data-base of Chinese characters where the etymologies could be traced. Now I'm trying to write a book helping foreigners learn Chinese characters."

The book, which Sears started working on since September, is expected to come out next March.

"After carefully examining over 9,000 characters on my website, I extracted about 900 single characters. These 900 characters would serve as the basis for learning complicated Chinese characters, as most Chinese characters consist of simple characters."

According to Sears, this is not a book of only half a year's work, but an accumulation of all his previous works. And this book is creative to some extend as it surpasses the conventional explanations of characters.

"Eighty percent of the content has been approved by Chinese character experts, 10 percent is disputable, and the rest is completely explained by myself."

A Chinese publishing house has already contacted Sears about publishing the issue next year.

"The big problem now remains that the book needs to be carefully proofread again and again, and I need to find a helper."

When asked whether he has confidence in the book, he said he's not sure whether it could make a lot of money - as books in China usually don't. But he's confident about the content of the book.

"The books on Chinese characters in the market are not compiled by Chinese character experts, a lot of them are just characters put together. Mine is not."