Chapter 3 of 7 · Weeks 2–3
How characters work
A few hundred parts, combined. Recognition first, handwriting later.
Every Chinese word on this page is tappable. Try .
There are thousands of characters, but most are built from a few hundred recurring parts. Once you know the parts, a new character looks like a combination of parts you have already seen.
Parts, not pictures
(good) is (woman) beside (child). (bright) is (sun) beside (moon). A few hundred parts like these, the components, turn up again and again.
You don’t need to memorize the parts in a list. As you read, you see them again and again inside real characters. A few hundred characters in, most new ones look like arrangements of parts you can already name.
Sound hints
Many characters pair a meaning part with a sound part. In (mā, mother), the left half is , woman: the meaning. The right half is (mǎ, horse), there only for its sound. Mother is “the woman word that sounds like ma”.
Thousands of characters work this way, which is why the system gets easier the more you know. Treat the sound hint as a clue, not a rule: sounds have drifted over the centuries, and the hint is often only close.
Common characters first
The 100 most common characters make up roughly 40 percent of ordinary text, and the 1,000 most common make up roughly 90 percent. You don’t need all of them; you need the frequent ones first. That is how the starter deck and the HSK 3.0 lists are ordered.
Handwriting can wait
On a phone or a computer you type pinyin, with no tones, and pick the character from a list. That is recognition, not recall of every stroke. Recognition is enough to read and type, so it comes first. Handwriting is worth learning later, but you do not need it to start reading.
When you see a new character
Ask two questions: what are its parts, and do I know any of them? Even when the answer is no, the question makes you look at the parts. If you want to go deep on components with mnemonics, Hanly is built for it.
English words work in a similar way. You can guess teleport because “television” and “telephone” already taught you tele-. A character part you know helps you in the same way.
Today’s assignment · 15–20 min
Learn twelve very common parts — tap each to hear it: person, mouth, sun, moon, water, tree, heart, hand, woman, speech, earth, fire.
Then open any Chinese text — a menu, a news site, a story in Dengdeng — and hunt for them for ten minutes. You won’t understand the text yet. You will start seeing the parts.
