How Chinese writing works
Each character is a syllable with a meaning, built from parts you can learn, and 1,000 of them cover 89% of a page.
We make Mandarin The Wild.
Characters, not letters
A character stands for a syllable and, most of the time, a meaning: 人 is rén, “person”, and 大 is dà, “big”. There is no alphabet to sound out, which is why a new character has to be learned once, as a shape with a sound and a meaning. China’s list of standard characters has 8,105 of them2, but a reader needs far fewer. In our count of Chinese web text, 6,328 different characters appear, and the most common few do most of the work1:
| The most common characters | Share of the characters on a page |
|---|---|
| 100 | 38% |
| 500 | 74% |
| 1,000 | 89% |
| 2,500 | 98.6% |
| 3,500 | 99.6% |
这个字怎么写？
character; written word
How characters are built
Most characters are made of smaller parts. One part, often on the left or on top, hints at the meaning; it is called the radical, and dictionaries file each character under one of 214 of them4. Another part often hints at the sound. Take 青 (qīng, “blue-green”): add 氵 water and you get 清 (qīng, “clear”), add 日 sun and you get 晴 (qíng, “sunny”), add 忄 heart and you get 情 (qíng, “feeling”), and add 讠 speech and you get 请 (qǐng, “please”). The sound is close, the meaning follows the radical.
A handful of radicals hold a large share of the characters a learner meets. Of the 3,082 characters in the words of the HSK lists3:
| Radical | Meaning | HSK characters filed under it |
|---|---|---|
| 扌 | hand | 188 |
| 氵 | water | 170 |
| 口 | mouth | 148 |
| 亻 | person | 124 |
| 木 | tree | 120 |
| 忄 | heart | 106 |
| 艹 | grass | 89 |
Characters are written stroke by stroke in a set order, top to bottom and left to right. The 2,500 most common characters take 9 strokes at the median, and only about a quarter take 12 or more; because the commonest are the simplest, a character on a page averages 7.4 strokes. The longest common ones run past 20: 罐 (guàn, “can”) has 23. Our stroke order pages draw every one, and the radicals page lists each radical’s characters.
这个字的笔画很多。
stroke (of a Chinese character)
Also written 筆畫
Words, with no spaces
Chinese is written without spaces, so a reader finds the words. Most words are one or two characters: in our count, 46% of the words on a page are a single character, 49% are two, and only 5% are three or more. Two-character words do most of the naming: 电话 (diànhuà, “telephone”) is 电 “electric” and 话 “speech”, and 火车 (huǒchē, “train”) is “fire vehicle”.
火车马上就要开了。
train
Also written 火車
Knowing where one word ends is part of reading. Paste any text into our word splitter to see the words our parser finds.
Which way it runs
Modern Chinese is written left to right in horizontal lines, as in English. Older books, and some newspapers and novels in Taiwan and Hong Kong, are set in vertical columns read top to bottom, starting from the right. Punctuation is full width: a full stop is a small circle (。), and the list comma (、) separates items in a list.
Pinyin is not the writing
Pinyin, the spelling of Chinese in Latin letters with tone marks (hàn zì), is how learners and phones type and how dictionaries give a sound, but Chinese readers read characters. Signs, books, menus and subtitles are in characters, so pinyin is a ladder to the sound, not a replacement. Our pinyin chart plays every syllable.
Two scripts
Mainland China and Singapore write simplified characters; Taiwan, Hong Kong and Macau write traditional ones. About two thirds of the characters on a page are the same in both; our guide to simplified or traditional has the counts.
What to do with this
- Learn the commonest characters first. The most common characters page lists them in order with their sound.
- Learn the parts. Once you know 氵, 口 and 亻, new characters stop being pictures and become combinations.
- Learn words, not lone characters. Half the words you read are two characters, and a word is what carries the meaning in a sentence.
- Read early. Characters stick when you meet them again and again in real text. The Library has graded stories from HSK 1, and the extension shows any word’s meaning on any page.
How we counted
Character shares are our language pack’s own count of FineWeb-2 web text, cut into words by our parser, with each word’s share given to every character in it and text in traditional characters left out1. Strokes are from our stroke-order data, radicals from the Unicode Han database4, and word lengths from the same count.
Questions
How does Chinese writing work?
Chinese is written in characters, each one syllable that usually carries a meaning. Most characters combine a part that hints at the meaning (the radical) with a part that hints at the sound, and words, mostly one or two characters long, are written with no spaces.
How many Chinese characters do you need to know?
In our count of Chinese web text, the 1,000 most common characters make up 89% of the characters on a page and the 2,500 most common 98.6%. China’s standard list has 8,105.
Is Chinese written left to right?
Yes, modern Chinese is written left to right in horizontal lines. Some books, especially in Taiwan and Hong Kong, use vertical columns read from the top right.
Sources
Checked on 27 October 2026. Prices and features change; tell us if one has.