Along the way, they explore the histories of the Chinese language and emoji, and inspire an interest in linguistics.

“Many of these images began as literal depictions of the world, from trees and birds to fire and water. Over time, both writing systems have evolved to suggest more complex concepts, like ‘that’s lit’ or ‘thank you’.”

Their book delves into complex linguistic ideas, like the difference between a logographic and a pictographic language, and even shows how emoji can be used to depict the “radicals” that provides guides to both meaning and pronunciation in written Chinese.

But the core of the new system is the use of emoji as stand-ins for Chinese characters.

When emoji are deployed in this way, the authors call them “hanmoji”, which combines hanzi, the word for Chinese characters, with emoji.

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“The Chinese character for ‘home’, for instance, is made up by placing the character for ‘roof’ over the character for ‘pig’,” she continues.

Pigs were domestic animals that were kept inside the home in the Shang dynasty (1600-1046BC), the era that provides the earliest examples of the Chinese written language, and that is how the character originally came about.

“We show the character, then break out the parts, using the emoji for ‘roof’ and ‘pig’,” says An. “Jason drew the emoji together so we can see the pig under the house. It shows how a character is built up – you can see that it is not a random process, there is a logic to it,” she says.

“Emoji are similar to Chinese,” says Lee. “A lot of emojis that look like a single character, if you look under the hood, are different characters sewn together. ‘Polar bear’ is made from the bear emoji and the snow emoji – it’s a kind of ‘compound emoji’,” she says.

The idea for hanmoji came about during a phone conversation between An and Lee. “We had been talking about a gathering at Jenny’s house, and so we had texted jia, the character for home. I noticed that it could be expressed as emoji, and we started sending similar ideas back and forth. We found it interesting that a lot of Chinese characters could be made up from emoji,” says An.

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“One of our primary goals was to encourage readers to have a playful relationship with written Chinese, and with learning written Chinese,” says Li. “A lot of people who do not have Chinese as their primary language have trouble learning it – it’s a hard language to make your way into.”

“We are taking something that people use every day, and saying, let’s play with it. So they start off thinking of Chinese as something fun. It’s a way of bringing some fun into learning,” Li says.

Both An and Li note that there is a difference between emoji and Chinese characters. Chinese is not now primarily a pictographic language – one in which the characters depict what they represent – although it started out that way. But emojis are essentially pictograms.

“There is a misperception that the Chinese language is pictographic, in that it literally depicts what is being discussed. But Chinese is more properly described as logographic, in that a character might represent a word or a phrase, and a set of characters might represent a concept,” says Li.

But emoji are starting to take on such meanings, too, says An. “I think that is something that is happening now with emoji – it’s moving from pictographic to logographic. For instance, the emoji that depicts a fire may be used to represent the idea ‘that’s lit’, which means something is cool,” she says.

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“Or the coffin emoji, which is used by the younger generation to denote laughter, as in ‘dying of laughter’,” she explains. “The coffin emoji was originally quite literal, but it now arguably has a figurative use.”

Emoji do not constitute a language, Lee says. “It can’t really be defined as a language, although it is a written form of communication. It’s the first digital-native form of communication. We need to come up with a different name for it,” she says.

Emoji are regarded as the tools of the young, but they have permeated communication culture so deeply that older people are starting to use them, says An.

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The Hanmoji Handbook is intended for anyone who wants a fun way to learn Chinese, says Li, who hopes that one day it will be available in schools.

“That was not a direct goal,” he says, “as we weren’t working with teachers, we weren’t testing it in classrooms. To get a book on to the curriculum, there are specific things it has to cover.

“But having said that, I would love to get it into some international schools, for instance. It would make a good textbook, or a good supplementary text book.”