Shadow puppet picture matching
208 characters matched with traditional shadow puppet art, so every pictographic and compound character has an image to hold on to.
Courses · for middle school students
Companion
In every volume
Learn characters the way they are built.
Three ways in, and they work together: a structured textbook series, a daily character course, and Twelve Images that group characters by the picture behind them.
Chinese Key · Secondary edition · ages 12 to 18
Seven modules, fourteen volumes
Each module has two volumes. Start with strokes and work up to building characters yourself. Pick a module to see what is inside.
The Visual Key method
Lessons teach you to find a character by its parts. The same method powers Visual input, so you can type what you have just learned.
Daily character course
2,288 characters, three a day
Six levels in a clear order. Free accounts unlock three new characters each day, so you build the habit before the pile gets big. Learner and Pro unlock everything at once.
If you study every day on a free account
Day 30
Characters unlocked
90
Level sizes: 347, 419, 461, 461, 352 and 248 characters. Drag the slider to see where a daily habit takes you.
Where the course meets HSK
The course follows school grades. HSK follows exam levels. Here is how they line up.
We checked every one of the 2,288 characters against the official nine-level list. 2,142 are in it, and 877 of those are among the 1,200 characters HSK asks you to write by hand. The other 146 are useful characters the exam does not list.
Read a row left to right: Level 1 of the course holds 174 HSK 1 characters, but also 51 from HSK 2, 62 from HSK 3 and a few from higher levels. Each character in the course shows its HSK level, with a mark for the 1,200 writing characters.
A second way in
Twelve Images
Learn characters by the picture behind them. Each image starts from a few root characters, then shows how they grow into everyday characters.
Every root character follows the same path: parts and structure, then the characters built from it, then its origin and everyday meaning, then example words.