During his 30 years of teaching Chinese, Joël Bel Lassen found his students were more likely than not to figure out the meaning of every single character by themselves. Some were creative enough to go beyond dictionaries to employ their imagination. For example, the character for “greed,” from top to bottom, is 婪, made up of “wood” and “woman.” Students hypothesized it indicated Eve of the Garden of Eden. The particular approach to each character is obviously influenced by the mother tongue of the student and their cultural narratives. However, that’s indeed the way European students learned written Chinese.