Прописи по китайскому иероглифическому письму. Первый этап обучения

You have started learning the Chinese language and have learned to pronounce the first words and phrases. And here is a book with unfamiliar written signs called hieroglyphs.
Hieroglyphs differ significantly from the letters you are already familiar with. The history... of Chinese writing goes back centuries. Chinese hieroglyphs are among the most ancient written signs.
Open the book and carefully examine the illustrations. Ancient hieroglyphs do not look like modern ones. They resemble children's drawings and emerged from signs that scholars refer to as pictograms, meaning drawing signs. They differ from ordinary drawings in that they depict only the most characteristic features of an object. For example, you see that the drawing signs representing a cow and a sheep are very similar, but the sign for "cow" has its horns curved upward, while the sign for "sheep" has its horns lowered.
The artist, with the help of illustrations, clearly showed how the form of the hieroglyph gradually changed over thousands of years - from a pictogram closely resembling real objects and beings to a modern writing sign that bears little resemblance to a drawing.