The power of images and imagination make learning Chinese easy for you
There are far more than 106,000 different Chinese characters in total, of which only about 5,000 are in daily use in China.
A normal Chinese student learns about 3,000 of them in his 10-year school career and can thus read 99.99% of all modern Chinese texts. only 1.000 characters allow you to read 90% of the text and only 300 characters allow you to understand 75% of a Chinese newspaper.
About 106 characters are of pictographic nature and can be illustrated with some creativity in pictures (like 火 "huǒ" which means fire or 山 "shān" which is the mountain). Another 30 characters are indicative and can also be illustrated (like 上 "shang" which means "above" or "up" and 下 "xià" which means the opposite, i.e. "below").
390 Chinese characters are combined by combining 2 or more already illustratable characters into a single one (sometimes creative explanations are needed, such as for 虾 "xiā", that from 虫 "chóng" (meaning insect or worm) and 下 "xià" (which we already know as "below"). Combined we get a worm/insect, which fishermen bring out of the depths "below" in the sea) - the shrimp.
That makes a total of about 540 Chinese characters, which with the help of illustrations and creativity can easily get into your head :-)
Click on any of the following basic building blocks to find more characters "eveolving" from this one:
With every illustration we will bring you some details on the illustrated Character like the exlanation of the meaning of course, which HSK level it appears in, other commonly used words this character in and so on.
See how exactly the illustrated Chinese Characters will be explained
The illustrated Simplified Chinese Character
The Character, Pinyin with tone marks and meaning of the character.
Explanation of the illustration (sometimes it needs a story to understand the characters picture and how it translates into the actual meaning).
HSK level the character appears in the first time, the actual word this character appears in and the translation of this HSK word.
Frequency level. At which position of the 9933 most commonly used Chinese Characters does the visualized character rank in the list of Hanzicraft?
Some more very commonly used words using this character, Pinyin of these words with tone marks and translation.