Questions about characters, and about this site
Study Chinese Characters is a site for learning Chinese characters by building them from their real parts. Below are the questions people ask most often — about how characters are put together, and about how this site handles them.
What is Study Chinese Characters?
Study Chinese Characters is a site for learning Chinese characters by building them. Each character has a short level — spot the parts that are really in it, assemble it with the right position and size, find it again with the answer hidden, then put it into a real word — alongside the reference material you would expect: pinyin, definitions in English and Chinese, stroke order and example words.
What is the difference between a component, a radical and a sound component?
They are three different things, and this site keeps them in three different fields. A component is a building block of the character’s shape. A radical is the single part a dictionary files the character under — a lookup convention, not a description of how the character is built. A sound component is the part that hints at the pronunciation, and only some characters have one. Calling all three “radical” is where a lot of confusion starts.
Why does the same character have two pronunciations?
Because the word decides the reading, not the character on its own. 好 is hǎo in 你好 and hào in 爱好, and the two readings carry different meanings. This site treats each (character, reading) pair as a separate thing to learn: you get the dominant reading first, and the second one is introduced through a word where you actually meet it — never as a table of “this character has two readings”.
Do I have to learn to handwrite Chinese?
No. Many learners only want to read and to type with pinyin, and that is a legitimate goal. Stroke practice is optional here. When you do trace a character, correct stroke order counts for far more than speed — speed is scored last, because a speed leaderboard would only encourage sloppy strokes.
Why does every level end with a word?
Because a character is not a word. Knowing 开 and knowing 心 does not get you to 开心. A level that ends with you having seen nothing but an isolated character has not finished the job, so the last beat of every level puts the character into a real word — which is also the only honest way to introduce a second reading.
Where does the data come from?
Stroke data comes from hanzi-writer-data under the Arphic Public License; English definitions from CC-CEDICT under CC BY-SA; code points, stroke counts and radical assignments from the Unicode Character Database. Chinese definitions are written by Study Chinese Characters and labelled as such — they are not taken from a published dictionary. Structural breakdowns are published only where a person has checked them.
Do I need an account? Is it free?
No account, and nothing to pay. The site sets no cookies and stores no IP addresses; a random id in your browser’s local storage is all that separates a returning visitor from a new one.
How is this different from flashcards?
A flashcard asks you to recognise an answer that is already in front of you. Here you have to produce it: drag the actual parts into the right position and size, then find the character again once it has been hidden. Recognition is easy and fades; putting something back together is harder and sticks better.