Everything about hanzi: how Chinese characters work, how many you need, how to look them up, type them and appreciate them in calligraphy.
Learn Chinese
A guide to online Chinese dictionaries and lookup tools for three common problems: finding the pronunciation of an unknown character, remembering how to write one, and translating Chinese text, with options for computers and mobile devices.
Chinese Characters
An in-depth guide to Chinese characters: what they are, how they differ from words and pinyin, the four types of characters (pictographs, ideographs and phonetic-semantic compounds), how many you need to know, and practical ways to learn them.
Chinese Characters
A step-by-step guide to typing Chinese: how pinyin, five-stroke and handwriting input methods work, how to install a Chinese keyboard on your computer or phone, how to type ΓΌ, select the right characters and enter whole words and phrases.
Chinese Characters
Chinese calligraphy developed alongside the Chinese script itself, from inscriptions on oracle bones to seal, clerical, cursive, regular and running scripts. This article outlines that evolution and why calligraphy is valued as an art, not just handwriting.
Chinese Characters
There is no single verified number of characters every Chinese speaker knows. A useful official benchmark is China's List of Commonly Used Standard Chinese Characters, whose first level has 3,500 high-frequency characters. The FAQ compares this with HSK words.