Beginner · 30 days · ~12 min a day
Characters in 30 days.
Chinese characters look like thousands of unrelated pictures. They are not. Most are built from a few hundred parts, and most of those parts tell you something: what the character is about, or roughly how it sounds. This course teaches the parts first, then the characters built from them, so that each new one is a combination rather than a new shape.
A day is marked done when you pass its quiz at the end: get 5 of its 8 questions right.
Each day's characters have stroke-order pages on the site: watch, trace, then write from memory. Works alongside the daily course from its first week.
How this course is different
Parts before characters: the radical and the sound part come first
Every character is shown in words you can use, not on its own
Stroke order you trace on screen, on the character pages
Ends reading real signs, menus and messages
Unit 1 · Strokes and pictures
DAY 1Strokes and the rulesDAY 2Order on the pageDAY 3Pictures that became charactersDAY 4Putting pictures togetherDAY 5Review: your first twenty
Unit 2 · Radicals: what it is about
DAY 6The mouth radicalDAY 7The water radicalDAY 8The person radicalDAY 9The woman radicalDAY 10Review: reading by radical
Unit 3 · More radicals
DAY 11The hand radicalDAY 12The speech radicalDAY 13The heart radicalDAY 14Grass and foodDAY 15Review: guessing a new character
Unit 4 · Sound parts
DAY 16Sound parts: 马DAY 17Sound parts: 青DAY 18Sound parts: 包 and 方DAY 19When the sound part misleadsDAY 20Review: meaning plus sound
Unit 5 · Characters of daily life
DAY 21Characters of foodDAY 22Characters of getting aroundDAY 23Characters of placesDAY 24Characters of timeDAY 25Review: reading a timetable
Unit 6 · Reading real text