Прописи по китайскому иероглифическому письму. Первый этап обучения

You have started learning Chinese, learned to pronounce the first words and phrases. And here is a book with unfamiliar written characters called ideograms.
The ideogram is quite different from the letters you are already used to. The history of Chinese... writing goes back centuries. Chinese ideograms are among the most ancient written signs.
Open the book and carefully examine the illustrations. Ancient ideograms do not look like modern ones. They resemble children's drawings and originated from signs that scientists call pictograms, that is, picture signs. They differ from ordinary drawings in that they depict only the most characteristic features of the object. For example, you see that the pictorial signs representing a cow and a sheep are very similar, but the 'cow' sign has horns that curve upwards, while the 'sheep' sign has them pointing downwards.
The artist, through illustrations, clearly showed how the form of the ideogram gradually changed over thousands of years - from a pictogram that closely resembled real objects and beings to the modern writing sign that bears little resemblance to a drawing.