How to Learn Chinese Characters Without Drowning

Chinese characters look like thousands of unrelated pictures, and that is why people give up. They are not unrelated. Most characters are built from a few hundred recurring parts, and the most common few hundred characters appear in most of what you will read. This guide gives you a method that uses both facts.

How many characters do you need?

Educated adults know somewhere between 3,000 and 8,000 characters, but you need far fewer to read. As a rough guide, the 1,000 most common characters cover about nine-tenths of everyday text, around 2,000 cover about 95 per cent, and about 3,000 cover roughly 98 per cent. That is why frequency matters: the first 500 characters you learn change your reading far more than the last 500.

Learn the parts, not the whole picture

Most characters have two kinds of part: one that hints at the meaning, and often one that hints at the sound.

• 氵(water) appears in water words: 河 hé (river), 海 hǎi (sea), 湖 hú (lake).
• 亻(person) appears in 你 nǐ (you), 他 tā (he) and 休 xiū (rest: a person leaning on a tree).
• 口 (mouth) appears in actions of the mouth: 吃 chī (eat), 喝 hē (drink), 叫 jiào (call).
• 女 (woman) appears in 妈 mā (mum), 姐 jiě (older sister), 好 hǎo (good: woman + child).
• 日 (sun, day) and 月 (moon, month) combine in 明 míng (bright).
• 心 (heart) appears in feelings: 想 xiǎng (think, want), 爱 ài (love).

Many characters are mostly a sound part plus a meaning part. 妈 mā is 女 (woman) plus 马 mǎ (horse), which gives the sound. 河 hé is 氵 (water) plus 可 kě. The sound hint is not exact, but it helps you guess and remember.

Make a habit of asking one question when you meet a new character: "what parts is this made of?" Five seconds on that question beats ten minutes of copying.

Stroke order basics

Stroke order is not decoration. It makes writing faster, neater and easier to remember, and handwriting recognition on a phone uses it. The core rules cover most characters:

• Top to bottom and left to right: 三 sān is written with the top stroke first.
• Horizontal before vertical when they cross: 十 shí is written with the horizontal stroke first.
• Left-falling before right-falling: 人 rén is the left stroke first, then the right stroke.
• Outside before inside, and close the box last: 日 rì and 国 guó are written with the outer frame first and the bottom stroke last.
• Centre before the two sides: 小 xiǎo is the middle stroke first, then left, then right.

Learn these rules, then write a few characters correctly every day. You will notice that new characters start to follow the rules without thinking.

Read before you write

Recognising a character and writing it from memory are different skills. Recognition is much easier, and it is what you need to read signs, menus and messages. Writing by hand is a harder skill that gets you less in daily life, because most Chinese is typed with pinyin. A common and sensible route is:

1. Learn to recognise the first 300 to 500 characters.
2. Type them in pinyin to build a link between sound and shape.
3. Write by hand only the simplest few hundred, to learn the strokes and components.

A method that works

• Learn characters in words and sentences. The character 好 matters less than 你好 and 很好. Words show how a character behaves and give it a sound and a meaning at once. The topic pages show every word in characters with pinyin, a picture and audio.
• Start with the most frequent. Numbers, family, food and everyday verbs come first in the beginner path.
• Review with sound. Playing words you can hear helps your memory to attach sound, shape and meaning. Try the Whack-a-Word game, where you hit the correct character after reading an English clue.
• Use the sentence games. Fill the Blank shows a sentence with one word missing; you recognise characters in context, which is what reading is.

How many new characters a day?

Five to ten a day, reviewed over the following days, is a pace many people can keep for months. That is around 150 to 300 a month, so 1,000 characters is a matter of months, not years. If you add 30 a day, you will forget them. Regular and small wins.

See characters in real words: open Chinese words to browse thousands of words with pinyin and meanings, or start with the numbers topic.