In Chinese, most characters are built out of roughly 100 “building blocks.” I designed a program on my computer and then started prioritizing the most common and useful building blocks.

For reference, common Chinese characters are made up of nine strokes on average. This is a huge leap in efficiency. (Valenti, by the way, was a Chinese translator during the Vietnam war, ...

A quiz that helps you review common Chinese characters you will come across in everyday text. By practicing and reviewing, you can learn 2,538 Hanzi, their meanings and pronunciations.

There are some 10,000 Chinese characters in common use. Basic literacy, according to the Chinese government, starts at two thousand characters. A solid grasp of a daily Beijing newspaper requires ...

In Chinese every character is read with a single syllable. To sum up, although the two languages both employ written characters, their differences outweigh their similarities, and Americans should not ...

There seems no alternative, then, but to slavishly learn the 3,500 or so characters that account for at least 99% of use in written Chinese. This is hard even for native Chinese speakers, usually ...

Mandarin Chinese is the most common language in the world, estimated to be spoken by more than 1.2 billion people in countries like China, Hong Kong, Singapore, Taiwan, and Malaysia. With so many ...