With the technology of today, there are tons of great resources online to enhance your Chinese learning experience.
In this post, I’ll cover how to learn to read and write Chinese characters plus give you the best resources to practice. Any one of these will help set you on the path to utilize Chinese readers, understand Chinese newspapers and eventually master reading Chinese novels.
Understand how characters work. Chinese characters look like random pictures at first sight, but they’re actually made up of parts that give us specific information. This makes it easier to intuitively figure out their meanings and pronunciations. Each character has a part that suggests the meaning—called the radical—and one part that suggests the pronunciation. It’s located on the right side of the character.
Learn common radicals first. As I just mentioned, radicals are extremely helpful because they help you guess the character’s meaning. Every character has at least one, but some have more. There are 214 radicals total, and you can learn them all in this guide here.
Handwrite characters first. Writing by hand is becoming less common in China (and all parts of the world) since we have the simplicity of typing now, but it’s extremely beneficial for memorizing new information. Because of this, I always recommend writing your new characters for about 10-20 repetitions before moving to only digital methods like flashcards. If you feel like your handwriting sucks on regular paper, there are tons of resources you can use to print off gridded sheets, like these from WriteMandarin.
Take a leveled character course to start with the easiest ones. There are many courses and apps that can teach you Chinese characters that follow a leveled curriculum. This helps you start with the easiest characters first—like pictograph characters—and then gradually move on to harder ones. There are tons on Udemy and Coursera, and some online programs like Yoyo Chinese have their own character courses. Mandarin Blueprint is the most extensive one I’ve found, and one of our editors wrote a review on it that you can find here.
Learn the most commonly used characters first. Some of the easiest characters are kind of weird and not commonly used. So another approach you can take is starting with the most frequently used ones. Although it might be a bit more challenging since some of the characters can be more difficult, this method helps you start understanding written texts faster since you’ll come across highly used characters that you know. I’d still recommend learning radicals first if you take this approach though. Here’s a list of the most common 1,000 Chinese words from Tutor Mandarin to start.
Choose whether or not you want to follow an HSK study path. If you want to take the HSK one day—or just like the idea of using an official, government-approved way of quantifying your Chinese level—you might not want to take any of the routes I’ve mentioned so far. In this case, I recommend learning the radicals first (as always) and then moving on to an HSK course, starting with level one. You can find plenty of them online or use textbooks like the popular HSK Standard Course series.
Read basic stories meant for beginners. Once you’ve learned about 500 characters, it’s important you actually start reading. Many people recommend children’s books, but I typically ignore this advice unless the book isn’t one of those that uses lots of nursery rhymes or mythical creatures. What I like to do instead is look for books specifically written for beginner learners in mind. Chinese Reading Practice has a page of reading exercises sorted by HSK level, and this is a book of 20 Chinese short stories for beginners on Amazon.
Use graded readers and parallel texts. Graded readers can be the same as beginner books, but there are graded readers for all levels. Also, they are specifically written for learners in mind, unlike a children’s book. Parallel texts are bilingual books that include the story in Chinese and the story in English so you can compare the translations. One graded reader I can recommend for the beginner to intermediate level is the Yoyo Chinese Character Reader Course. And you can find plenty of parallel texts on Amazon.
Practice Resources for Reading and Writing Chinese Characters
Skritter is a resource that is fundamentally different from all the other resources that we will go through today. This is because Skritter uses a completely different system for learning Chinese characters.
Skritter focuses on learning characters through actual writing—but through the screen. Instead of just learning to recognize characters, you take on a more active style by writing them out individually in the Skritter course you’re taking. There’s also the context of the character, practice sentences, component radicals and an audio clip of the pronunciation included with each one.
Like a lot of the other resources, there are several user-made courses to choose from so that the advanced learners don’t have to go through the basics all over again.
Skritter also makes use of spaced repetition software (SRS). This is a system that optimizes learning through review intervals. Unfamiliar characters are reviewed more often, and familiar characters are reviewed less often.
In fact, other language programs like FluentU use SRS, and the two programs can be used in tandem to maximize the process of learning Chinese characters.
FluentU takes authentic videos—like music videos, movie trailers, news and inspiring talks—and turns them into personalized language learning lessons.
You can try FluentU for free for 2 weeks. Check out the website or download the iOS app or Android app.
In any case, Skritter is a pretty neat tool that can offer you unique assistance in learning Chinese characters and practicing things like stroke order.
Pleco is one of the most popular Chinese dictionary apps. It’s used for Chinese-to-English translations and English-to-Chinese translations. However, it comes with flashcard decks that may remind you of Anki (reviewed below).
Similar to Anki, there are user-made flashcard decks that you can download and synchronize. There are different courses designed for all different learning goals and learning styles. Whether you’re a beginner interested in learning HSK 1 vocabulary or an advanced learner studying HSK 6, Pleco has it covered.
Additionally, since Pleco’s primary function is that of a dictionary, it’s very easy to browse unfamiliar words and characters. The definitions are quite in-depth, so you can get a good grasp of characters through sample words and phrases.
Pleco is free, so it’s a valuable addition to any learner’s arsenal. It can be used in 5-10 minute intervals of downtime because of its simplicity.
Rememberit has over 3,500 flashcards ready to study and employs an attractive, easy-to-use interface that makes learning addictive. There’s an introduction that teaches you how to use the system. You can study the first 100 characters for free then need a subscription to continue.
Every day you are given new flashcard vocabulary lists, which you can preview and then later commit to memory.
At the end of the day’s vocabulary list, you aren’t given the option to continue and learn extra. However, there is plenty to study daily, so this will not be a problem in normal cases. For you overachievers, it might be nice to have a program that will manage your unreasonably high expectations. It’s far better to fully memorize a given set of characters than to try to overstuff your brain and lose half your already-learned characters in the process.
The process of learning the characters is nicely designed. Each day’s lesson will feature a set of characters that are related to one another, like 中 and 忠. From these character sets, you come to see the connections between similar characters.
Another laudable feature is the contextualization of each character. Every character flashcard comes with a number of words in which the character is a component. From these words, you can better understand each character in a wider context. Finally, you’re able to hear what the character sounds like with the integrated audio system. Each lesson is carried out utilizing a helpful SRS review algorithm.
Rememberit comes with one noteworthy disadvantage, which is its lack of support for character writing. However, with its strong advantages, it’s still a good resource.
Anki is a flashcard program that makes learning very simple. You just download the software and then download a flashcard deck you are interested in or make your own.
It’s very straightforward and quite effective. There are several decks available to download. These decks are uploaded by users and encompass a wide variety of characters. For example, some decks might only contain radicals for beginners while others might be about characters required for the HSK 6 for advanced learners.
Since the flashcards are user-created, it is worth mentioning that they may vary in quality. Some flashcard decks do not have sound, which can be very important for mastering difficult Chinese character pronunciations.
Anki also uses SRS for more effective learning. A good thing about Anki is its customizability and additional features in this aspect. Unlike some of the other resources, there is no fixed system that determines your learning experience. Instead, there is an options menu for each deck that allows you to select learning preferences, mostly relating to customizing the deck’s SRS to your tastes. My favorite is the statistics menu that shows your learning statistics for the deck.
However, Anki can’t help with some aspects of learning. Like Rememberit, Anki can’t help with character writing due to the nature of the software, but this disadvantage can be mitigated by using other supplemental programs. It’s available in many formats, so it’s a handy app to download on different devices where you can study during five-minute downtime periods.
Memrise is a website founded by Ed Cooke, who is a Memory Grandmaster. Building on his experiences, Memrise incorporates mnemonic techniques into its learning environment as well as SRS. All in all, these work together to create a unique learning resource.
Memrise’s community website uses user-made content in the form of various courses. It’s particularly good at user engagement, as Memrise innovates the learning experience by creating a game-like system. You earn points for reviewing and learning new terms, and you can compete with friends. This type of system makes Memrise’s learning environment less stiff and more fun.
I’ve found tons of HSK character decks, and decks that teach the most common Chinese words.
However, Memrise doesn’t focus on writing. Despite this, it’s undeniable that Memrise’s innovative learning strategies make it a fabulous resource. It’s perfect if you want to get started learning a large number of Chinese characters quickly and effectively. However, you may require further familiarization with each character using other resources.
This book has been helping many learners with their journey to learn Chinese characters since 2008, and the system still remains relevant enough for learners today to use it as well. There are two books in the series, and each contains approximately 1500 characters.
The author—James Heisig—promotes a mnemonic device-driven approach to memorizing characters. For the first pages, he offers a long suggestion paragraph to use as a reference for mnemonic tools. Later on, he gives a few keywords and leaves the reader to draw on their own experiences and knowledge to create a personal mnemonic technique for each character.
Another positive is that the author also focuses on writing as well. His method involves character writing in the same vein, through mnemonic tools like short stories involving the component parts of the character. In this way, memorization and writing both use mnemonic techniques.
One thing to note is that James Heisig primarily focuses on understanding and writing. He doesn’t go over character tones or give information on how the character is to be used in a bigger context. Essentially, this book focuses on learning characters and simply assigning them their basic meanings. This book may come in handy for some learners, but it needs to be used in conjunction with other resources.
Learning how to read and write Chinese characters is a process that takes time. It won’t happen overnight, so be patient and have fun. Now that you have these tips and resources, all you need is to start, stay consistent and watch your progress grow.
If you want to continue learning Chinese with interactive and authentic Chinese content, then you'll love FluentU.
FluentU naturally eases you into learning Chinese language. Native Chinese content comes within reach, and you'll learn Chinese as it's spoken in real life.
FluentU has a wide range of contemporary videos—like dramas, TV shows, commercials and music videos.
FluentU brings these native Chinese videos within reach via interactive captions. You can tap on any word to instantly look it up. All words have carefully written definitions and examples that will help you understand how a word is used. Tap to add words you'd like to review to a vocab list.
FluentU's Learn Mode turns every video into a language learning lesson. You can always swipe left or right to see more examples for the word you're learning.
The best part is that FluentU always keeps track of your vocabulary. It customizes quizzes to focus on areas that need attention and reminds you when it’s time to review what you’ve learned. You have a 100% personalized experience.
