Happiness, luck, wealth
The characters people look up most for a gift, a card or to decorate a home.
Love and feelings
From “love” to “forever”: words people write to the ones close to them.
Strength and character
Qualities people choose for a motto — and most often for a tattoo.
Family and life
The very first characters: person, home, friend.
Nature and the elements
Many of these characters were once pictures: 山 shows three peaks, 火 tongues of flame.
Animals
Dragon, tiger and more — half of them are among the twelve signs of the Chinese zodiac.
A character or a word
A character isn’t a letter, and it isn’t always a word. Each character means something and is read as one syllable, but most words in modern Chinese are made of two characters. So one English word often has both a character and a word:
- Happiness. 福 means “blessing, good fortune”: it is written on red paper and hung on the door. 幸福 is “happiness” in everyday speech: “a happy family”, “I’m happy”.
- Love. 爱 is both “to love” and “love”. 爱情 is only the feeling between two people.
- Strength. 力 is strength as such, and part of many words. 力量 is “strength, power” as a word of its own.
- Life. 生命 is life as existence, 生活 is life as daily living, and 命 also means “fate”.
If you need a character for an inscription, look at the word’s page: it shows which phrases the character lives in and what it really means there.
Simplified and traditional
Since the middle of the 20th century mainland China has used simplified characters, and those are what this site teaches. Taiwan, Hong Kong and old inscriptions use traditional forms. Both forms of a pair mean and read the same; only the writing differs:
Chinese and Japanese characters
Japanese kanji are Chinese characters borrowed more than a thousand years ago. Most of them mean the same: 山 is “mountain” in both. But they are read differently, and Japan simplified some characters in its own way: “dragon” is 龙 in China and 竜 in Japan. If you need the Chinese character, check it against the Chinese spelling.
How characters are written
All 1940 characters of HSK 1–6, with step-by-step stroke order, readings and words, are in the list of HSK characters.
A character is written stroke by stroke in a fixed order: top to bottom and left to right. Every word page shows the order step by step, and on the practice sheets you can trace any character and print it. What parts characters are built from and how they hint at the meaning is in the article on radicals, and how many characters you need to know is in the article on the “Chinese alphabet”.
Frequently asked questions
How many Chinese characters are there?
There’s no exact number: the largest dictionaries list more than fifty thousand, but almost all of them are rare. About 3,500 are enough to read newspapers and books, and first conversations and texts get by with a few hundred.
What is the Chinese character for happiness?
福 (fú) means “happiness, blessing, good fortune”: it is hung on doors for the New Year. The everyday word for “happiness” is 幸福 (xìngfú), and “joy” is 快乐 (kuàilè).
What is the Chinese character for luck?
There is no single character for “luck”. The word for “luck” is 幸运 (xìngyùn), and “fortune” is 运气 (yùnqi). Good wishes use 吉 (jí, “auspicious”) and the same 福.
Are Chinese and Japanese characters the same?
Japanese kanji came from China, and most characters mean the same. But they are read differently, and some are written differently: China uses simplified forms, Japan has its own. “Dragon”, for example, is 龙 in China and 竜 in Japan.
Is it a good idea to get a tattoo of a Chinese character?
It can be, but show the text to a native speaker first. Check that the character is written correctly and isn’t upside down, that it is the Chinese and not the Japanese form, and that several characters together make a word, not a random string.
How do I find out how to write a character?
Every character has a stroke order: top to bottom and left to right. The word page shows it step by step, and on the practice sheets you can trace the character and print it.
Characters stick in words
In the course a character appears in a word, the word in a phrase, and you write it stroke by stroke. The first lessons are free, no sign-up.
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