The 5 best websites to learn Chinese characters in 2024

If you’re looking to learn Chinese characters in 2024, you’ve come to the right place. There are so many resources available these days it is confusing on where to get started. I've sifted through them to create a list of high quality options and have made clear which is best depending on your learning objectives.

Before we start, you should have already decided on two things. First, decide if you want to learn traditional or simplified Chinese characters. Both have their perks and cultural significance but unless you are planning to go to Taiwan I recommend you learn Simplified Characters. For a deeper look, check out our article on Simplified vs Traditional Chinese Characters. Secondly, are you looking to just learn how to type and recognise Chinese characters or do you want to be able to hand write them too? It's pretty common (and much faster) to learn to just type and recognise characters as handwriting requires a lot more memorisation. If you don't know, read our article Should you learn to hand write Chinese characters.

Now that you’ve considered these key points, let’s jump into the best websites and apps to learn Chinese characters in 2024.

• Skritter
• NinaChinese
• HanziHero
• Anki
• Pleco & YoYoChinese
• Summary + Decision tree

Skritter = Learn to write by hand

If you do want to learn to write characters by hand, then Skritter is hands down the platform for you. It is the only option with a focus on writing by hand. Their app combines flashcards with a digital interface where you draw out the characters. It teaches you the stroke order for each character and even corrects your handwriting. It combines this with a Spaced repetition learning system and lots of vocab lists for you to study. I'm personally not learning to write Chinese characters by hand, but if I was I would definitely use Skritter.

NinaChinese = Super Scientific Method + Cats

So clearly there are wrong ways to learn Chinese Characters. There are thousands of characters and you could learn each one in isolation as just a meaningless sets of lines. If you did this you would be making your life unnecessarily difficult as the great thing about Chinese characters is that (very roughly speaking) they can be broken down into component characters and radicals. If you learn these components and their meaning it will be much easier for you to identify and even accurately guess the meaning of the many composite characters.

Ready to nerd out? Recent research has found that taking advantage of this hierarchical network of Chinese characters allows you to learn them at a greatly accelerated pace.

The idea is super simple. Learn the primitive components and characters first, and subsequent learning will be much easier.

NinaChinese have built a learning pathway around this idea. It starts with the most primitive components and characters and builds up from there. I really applaud them for this as I love any "hacks" that allow you to learn faster.

This approach does come with some downsides however. For starters, whilst this is scientifically the fastest strategy in the long term it will take a while to start paying off. You start with a lot of primitive components and characters that, whilst used in a lot in other characters, may themselves be super rare characters. After a month you might know a large collection of components, but you will struggle to engage with any actual written content. In contrast, if you spend your first month memorising the HSK1 characters you would immediately have access to elementary resources that you could read and engage with. I think the NinaChinese strategy is a great one, but it will require some initial patience and you need to be in it for the long haul.

The final thing I'd say is that the NinaChinese platform won't be for everyone. Personally, I don't really like the site's interface. There's a lot of cats, badges and talk of world building. Now maybe I am just a grumpy old man, but I like super clean nerdy interfaces and ideally web apps that do just one thing. NinaChinese is a great resource that does a lot of things, but for me, all those things might get in the way of someone who just wants to learn Chinese characters. If you want the scientifically optimal method to learn Characters and can put up with some delay in your reading ability, give it a go.

HanziHero = Mnemonics + beautiful interface

NinaChinese's method is super scientific and is a great learning hack for those of us who are good at memorising things without needing a deep story behind it. If you like stories and using mneunomics to memorise things then HanziHero is the perfect resource for you.

HanziHero takes inspiration from a really popular book called Heisig's Remembering Hanzi. This book covers the writing and meaning of the 1000 most commonly used characters in Chinese. The book does organise the characters in a way that takes advantage of their component structure but has a greater focus on useful words than the NinaChinese course. It's key focus is on creating mneunomics and little stories to help users memorise the characters. These stories tie the primitive elements and key words together, in theory making them easier to learn and preventing you from forgetting from them.

This mneunomics based approach seems to really work for some people and help them memorise characters. For what it's worth, it's not an approach that works for me. I occasionally will try and associate hard to memorise characters with certain stories or ideas but to do that for every character and component sounds exhausting,

I will say that HanziHero has an excellent UX, so if the menunomic approach works for you, this is a great resource.

Anki = Super customisable

Anki isn't an application made for specifically learning Chinese characters, instead it is an open source super powerful Spaced Repetition Flashcard system. It is highly customisable which means you can create flashcards in any style and customise how you are tested, whether it is by typing in answers or just a system where you click "Easy, hard".

Another great thing about Anki is that people share the decks they make. This means there are thousands of really high quality decks available to you, including decks designed to help you learn Chinese characters.

The customisability of Anki is its greatest strength but also it's greatest weakness. A lot of people download Anki, find it confusing and then never use it again. I don't blame them. The interface is confusing and very dated. The docs that explain how to use Anki whilst comprehensive are really long, and to get the best out of it you have to install various add-ons that extend it's behaviour. I am currently using Anki with a grammar focused flashcard deck and I do find it very clunky, if it wasn't for the many community decks I wouldn't use it.

For the reason above, if you are just starting out learning Chinese characters and haven't used Anki before, I wouldn't recommend it. You will spend your first few weeks learning both Chinese Characters and how to use Anki which isn't ideal. I do recommend you check it out at some point but don't worry if you bounce right off it, lots of people do.

Yoyo Chinese + Pleco = Course + Flashcards

Ok this last suggestion is a sneaky one as I am recommending you combine two resources rather than just use one. Yoyo Chinese offers a fantastic introductory course which covers 300 super useful characters. Characters are broken down, used in sentences and mneunomics suggested. I highly recommend checking out this course and recording all the characters you learn in Pleco.

What is Pleco? Pleco is the most popular Chinese character app out there and for good reason. It combines a really high quality character dictionary with a simple spaced repetition flashcard system. This is the perfect combo. You can store all the characters you learn in it's SRS system and each one comes with a breakdown into it's constituent parts. This makes it one of the most effective learning tools for learning Chinese characters and I would wager most Chinese language learners have it installed on their phone.

Combining the YoYoChinese course with Pleco means you get a gradual structured introduction but also start using one of the most useful tools in any Chinese learners's tool kit. I think this is a great way to get started.

To sum up

It's very easy to be overwhelmed when faced with a challenge like learning chinese characters. All the resources I've listed above have a lot to offer and you wouldn't go wrong with picking any one of them. Which one you go for really depends on your learning preferences. Use the decision tree below to confirm which resource is best for you:

Regardless of the resource you choose, the most important thing is to just get started. We all learn differently and your not going to find your optimal learning method on your first try. Learning Chinese Characters is difficult but is an incredibly rewarding personal achievement and gives you access to China's incredibly rich culture and history.

We are making our own web app to help you learn chinese characters. It's not in the list as it is still in development but you can sign up to the wait list and get free early access to it.

Until then get learning and enjoy, VocabHacker