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About Learn Chinese

How these pages work, the research behind them, who made what, and what happens with your data.

The method in short

  • Characters in small steps, with their parts. Each new character comes with its stroke order, sound, meaning and the parts it is built from. Learners who know the meaning parts (radicals) of characters learn new words more easily (Shen and Ke 2007), and writing characters by hand strengthens knowledge of their shapes (Tan et al. 2005; Guan et al. 2011).
  • Recall first, then check. Every card asks you to remember before it shows the answer. Testing yourself is one of the most effective ways to study (Roediger and Karpicke 2006; Dunlosky et al. 2013).
  • Spaced reviews. Cards return just before you would forget them. The timing uses the formulas and default settings of FSRS, the open scheduler that Anki also offers, which grew out of research by Ye, Su and Cao (2022). Spreading practice out beats cramming (Cepeda et al. 2006).
  • Sound with everything. Characters and words always come with pinyin and a recording, so sound, shape and meaning are learned together (Mayer 2009).
  • Stories you can follow. Readers understand a text well when they know about 98 percent of its words (Hu and Nation 2000). The stories use HSK 1 and 2 words, and a tap explains any word you do not know yet.
  • Little and often. About 20 cards a day, around ten minutes, with a daily goal and no penalty for missing a day.

What you learn

The 297 words of HSK levels 1 and 2 in the HSK 2.0 lists, which most beginner textbooks follow, and the 346 characters they are written with. The HSK exams move to the new HSK 3.0 standard with the first tests on 13 December 2026; 271 of these 297 words are also in levels 1 and 2 of the new lists, so nothing here is wasted.

Credits and licences

  • Stroke animation and writing practice: Hanzi Writer by David Chanin, MIT licence.
  • Stroke shapes, character parts, sound and meaning components and the short character hints: Make Me a Hanzi by Shaunak Kishore. The stroke data is derived from fonts by Arphic Technology and is under the Arphic Public License; the dictionary data is under the GNU LGPL 3.0 or later.
  • HSK word lists: complete-hsk-vocabulary by drkameleon, MIT licence.
  • Review timing: the FSRS formulas and default parameters as published in ts-fsrs by the Open Spaced Repetition project, MIT licence.
  • Voice: the open speech model Kokoro v1.1-zh (voice zf_003), Apache License 2.0, run with sherpa-onnx, Apache License 2.0.
  • Stories, word glosses, explanations and the code of these pages were written for this site with Claude, an AI model by Anthropic.

The sound file on this site also contains the Hanzi Writer code and the stroke data, together with their licence texts.

Made with AI: the EU AI Act

Article 50 of the EU AI Act applies from 2 August 2026. It also covers websites outside the EU, such as this Swiss one, when their content is used in the EU. It asks for two things. Companies that offer AI systems which generate audio, images, video or text must mark that output as AI-generated in a machine-readable way. And whoever publishes deepfakes, or AI-written text meant to inform the public on matters of public interest, must say so, unless a person reviewed the text and is editorially responsible for it.

Here is how that applies to these pages. The recordings are synthetic speech from Kokoro: not a recording of a person, and not imitating any real person. The stories and explanations are language practice, not news or public-interest reporting. So a label is not strictly required, but we add one anyway: the audio, stories and glosses on these pages were made with AI and are published by DerSuperF, who is responsible for them. The sound file also carries a machine-readable note that its audio is AI-generated.

Your data

  • There is no account and no sign-up, and these tools collect no personal data.
  • Your progress (which characters, words and stories you practised and when) and your settings are stored only in your browser on this device, in its local storage under the name learn-chinese-v1. They are never sent to this website or to anyone else.
  • This storage exists only to give you the practice you asked for; it is not used for tracking or advertising. Use the buttons under Your progress above to save a backup, load it on another device or delete everything. A backup you load is read inside your browser and never uploaded, and only the progress data these tools know is taken from it. Clearing your browser data deletes it too.
  • Sound, stroke shapes and code are loaded from this website. If the sound file cannot be reached, the stroke shapes and the writing code come from the public jsDelivr service instead, which, like any web server, sees your IP address.
  • Ads, statistics and cookies on the rest of this website are separate from these tools and are described in the privacy policy.

Sources

  • Cepeda, N. J., Pashler, H., Vul, E., Wixted, J. T. and Rohrer, D. (2006). Distributed practice in verbal recall tasks: a review and quantitative synthesis. Psychological Bulletin 132(3), 354 to 380. DOI
  • Dunlosky, J., Rawson, K. A., Marsh, E. J., Nathan, M. J. and Willingham, D. T. (2013). Improving students’ learning with effective learning techniques. Psychological Science in the Public Interest 14(1), 4 to 58. DOI
  • Guan, C. Q., Liu, Y., Chan, D. H. L., Ye, F. and Perfetti, C. A. (2011). Writing strengthens orthography and alphabetic-coding strengthens phonology in learning to read Chinese. Journal of Educational Psychology 103(3), 509 to 522. Semantic Scholar
  • Hu, M. and Nation, I. S. P. (2000). Unknown vocabulary density and reading comprehension. Reading in a Foreign Language 13(1), 403 to 430. nflrc.hawaii.edu
  • Mayer, R. E. (2009). Multimedia Learning, 2nd edition. Cambridge University Press.
  • Roediger, H. L. and Karpicke, J. D. (2006). Test-enhanced learning: taking memory tests improves long-term retention. Psychological Science 17(3), 249 to 255. DOI
  • Shen, H. H. and Ke, C. (2007). Radical awareness and word acquisition among nonnative learners of Chinese. The Modern Language Journal 91(1), 97 to 111. DOI
  • Tan, L. H., Spinks, J. A., Eden, G. F., Perfetti, C. A. and Siok, W. T. (2005). Reading depends on writing, in Chinese. PNAS 102(24), 8781 to 8785. DOI
  • Ye, J., Su, J. and Cao, Y. (2022). A stochastic shortest path algorithm for optimizing spaced repetition scheduling. KDD 2022. Code and paper; FSRS: Open Spaced Repetition.