How to Learn Chinese Characters: A Method That Sticks

The best way to learn Chinese characters is to learn the common ones first, inside words and sentences rather than one at a time, using their parts to remember them, and to review them with spaced repetition. Learn to recognise a character before you worry about writing it, and start reading simple texts early, because reading is where characters stop being flashcards and become familiar. About 1,000 characters make up roughly 90% of everyday written Chinese, so a steady few a day gets you a long way.

This page is about the method: what to learn, in what order, and how to make it stick. For the pace, see how many characters to learn a day, and for the counts at each level, our HSK vocabulary list.

The Method in Six Steps

1. Learn pinyin and the tones first. It takes a week or two, and it's how you'll look up, type and remember the sound of every character. Our pinyin guide and pinyin chart cover it.
2. Follow a frequency list. Learn characters in roughly the order Chinese uses them. The HSK word lists do this for you.
3. Learn words, not lone characters. Meet 学 inside 学生 (xuésheng, student) and 学校 (xuéxiào, school), not as a dictionary entry.
4. Notice the parts. Most characters are built from a few familiar components, one hinting at the meaning and one at the sound.
5. Review with spaced repetition. A few minutes a day, with each word coming back just before you'd forget it.
6. Read early. As soon as you know a couple of hundred words, read graded texts, so you meet each character again in new company.

Start With the Characters You'll See Most

Chinese has tens of thousands of characters, but a small share of them does most of the work. Researchers count how often each character appears in large collections of modern texts, and the results are very consistent. One study's figures, as summarised in Wikipedia's article on character frequency:

Source: Xing (2007), on a corpus of 4,868 different characters. China's Ministry of Education gives similar numbers: about 940 characters for 90% coverage and 2,400 for 99%.

So the first 1,000 characters matter far more than the next 1,000. A word of caution, though: knowing 90% of the characters on a page isn't the same as understanding 90% of it. Characters combine into words whose meaning you can't always guess, and the 10% you don't know are often the words that carry the meaning. Our post on how many words 3,000 characters make goes into this.

You don't need to find a frequency list yourself. The HSK lists are built from common words, so working through HSK 1 to 4 covers the core: about 1,060 different characters by our count, which is roughly the 90% mark.

Learn Characters Inside Words

A Chinese character on its own is a syllable with a range of meanings. A word is what you actually read and say. 电 (diàn) means "electricity" in the dictionary, but you'll meet it as 电话 (diànhuà, phone), 电视 (diànshì, television), 电影 (diànyǐng, film) and 电脑 (diànnǎo, computer). Learning those words teaches you 电 four times over, in the places you'll see it.

It also pays off more the further you go. We counted the characters in the HSK 1 to 6 word lists (the same lists Mandarin Mosaic's HSK lessons use) and checked how many of each level's new words are made only of characters you've already met at a lower level:

At the start, every word brings new characters. By HSK 6, more than half the new words are built entirely from characters you already know: 生 (shēng) alone turns up in 33 of the 5,000 words, from 学生 and 医生 (yīshēng, doctor) at HSK 1 to 生活 (shēnghuó, life) and 生意 (shēngyi, business) at HSK 4. The characters get easier because you're mostly recombining ones you know. That's why it's worth learning them through words from day one.

Use the Parts to Remember Them

Characters aren't random drawings. Most are built from a small set of recurring components, and most common characters are "phonetic-semantic compounds": one part hints at the meaning, another at the sound.

The hints are only hints. The sound part often gives a similar syllable with a different tone, as in all four examples, and centuries of sound change have broken many of the links. But once you know a few dozen common components, a new character stops being twelve strokes to memorise and becomes two parts you already know. Our guide to radicals in Chinese lists the common meaning parts.

When the parts don't explain a character, make up a short story from them. 休 (xiū, to rest) is 亻 (person) next to 木 (tree): a person leaning against a tree. 好 (hǎo, good) is 女 (woman) and 子 (child). Silly stories work as well as true ones, as long as you can picture them. Don't spend time on a story for characters you already remember, though; save it for the ones that keep slipping.

You don't need to learn all 214 traditional radicals before you start. Learn components as they come up in the words you're learning, and the common ones will repeat often enough to stick.

Recognise First, Write Later

Recognising a character and writing it from memory are different skills, and the second takes much longer. Most learners today read on screens and type in pinyin, so recognition is what they use every day. A sensible order is:

• Recognise every character you learn: see it in a word, know its sound and meaning.
• Write some by hand, if you want to, starting with the most common and the ones you keep mixing up.

Handwriting isn't wasted effort, though. In a 2011 study of people learning Chinese as a second language (Guan and colleagues, Journal of Educational Psychology), those who wrote characters by hand remembered their shapes and meanings better than those who only read them, while typing in pinyin helped with the sounds. If you enjoy writing, it helps you remember; if you don't have time, recognition plus typing is a good trade. Our guide to handwriting in Chinese covers stroke order and practice.

Review With Spaced Repetition

You will forget most new characters within days unless you see them again. Spaced repetition fixes that cheaply: an app shows each word again just before you'd forget it, at longer and longer gaps, so a few minutes a day keeps hundreds of words fresh.

A few rules make the reviews count:

• Test recognition, not recall of English. Show the Chinese and recall the sound and meaning, rather than the other way round.
• Put the word in a sentence. Seeing 电影 in 我们去看电影吧 (wǒmen qù kàn diànyǐng ba, let's go and see a film) is easier to remember than 电影 on its own, and it teaches you how the word is used.
• Keep new cards steady. Five to ten new words a day, every day, beats fifty on a Sunday. Reviews build up, so a pace you can keep for months matters more than a fast start.
• Add audio. Hearing the word every time you see it ties the character to its sound.

You can use Anki with a ready-made deck (our list of Chinese Anki decks has free sentence decks), or an app that does the scheduling for you.

Read as Soon as You Can

Flashcards get characters into your memory; reading keeps them there. Each time you meet a character in a story or article, in a slightly different word or sentence, the memory gets a little stronger, without the effort of a review. It's also where you learn the things cards can't teach: which words go together, and how sentences flow.

Start with graded readers or apps that keep texts at your level, where you know nearly every word. Once you've learned around 300 to 500 words, short graded stories become possible. Our guide to comprehensible input explains why reading at the right level helps so much, and reading Chinese news is a good next step later on.

Simplified or Traditional Characters?

Learn one set first. Simplified characters are used in mainland China and Singapore, and Traditional characters in Taiwan, Hong Kong and Macau. Many characters are the same in both, and once you know one set well, the other is much quicker to pick up. Choose the one used where you'll read or travel most. Our guide to learning Traditional Chinese compares them.

Common Mistakes

• Learning characters in isolation, from a list of the "top 100 characters", and then not recognising them in words.
• Writing each character 50 times. Copying isn't remembering. Writing it from memory a few times, spread over days, does far more.
• Learning all the radicals before any words. They make more sense, and stick better, when you meet them inside characters you're learning.
• Adding too many new cards, then quitting when the reviews pile up.
• Putting off reading until you "know enough characters". Graded texts are made for the stage you're at now.

Frequently Asked Questions

How Long Does It Take to Learn Chinese Characters?

At five or six new characters a day, through words, you'd reach about 1,000 characters in six months and the roughly 2,660 of the HSK 6 list in 15 to 18 months, as long as you keep up the reviews. Most learners go slower, because the words around the characters take time too. Our post on how many characters to learn a day covers realistic paces.

How Many Chinese Characters Do I Need to Know?

About 1,000 lets you recognise roughly 90% of the characters in everyday text, which is around HSK 4. Around 2,500 to 3,000 lets you read most things comfortably. Our HSK vocabulary list gives the character counts for every level.

Should I Learn Radicals First?

Not all of them. Learn the common components as you meet them in words, and look up a component when a character seems hard to remember. A few dozen frequent ones will make most new characters easier.

Do I Need to Learn to Write Characters by Hand?

Not to read or type Chinese. Handwriting does help you remember a character's shape and meaning, so it's worth doing for some characters if you have the time, but many learners focus on recognition and typing.

What's the Fastest Way to Memorise Chinese Characters?

There's no shortcut that skips the reviews, but the fastest reliable route combines the steps above: common words first, components to make each character memorable, spaced repetition for a few minutes a day, and plenty of easy reading.

Want to learn characters the way this page describes? Mandarin Mosaic teaches each new word inside a short sentence where you know the rest, with audio, pinyin when you need it, and spaced repetition built in. It follows the HSK lists, supports Simplified and Traditional characters, and has graded articles to read. It's on iPhone and Android, and at the time of writing Premium's first month is free, with a limited free plan. Get it on iOS or Android.

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