What is hanzi?
Hanzi (汉字), literally “Han characters”, is the writing system used for Chinese. Unlike an alphabet, where letters spell out sounds, each hanzi is a logograph: a single character writes a word or a meaningful part of one, packing sound and meaning into one compact glyph. Written Chinese has been in continuous use for over three thousand years, and because the characters encode meaning rather than any one spoken form, the same text can be read aloud differently by speakers of Mandarin, Cantonese, or other Chinese varieties. Neighbouring writing systems grew out of the same tradition — Japanese kanji and Korean hanja are direct descendants — though each has since evolved its own simplifications and usage.
How hanzi are built
Every character is drawn from a small inventory of strokes, written in a fixed order — one to more than thirty of them. Within a character, recurring parts carry meaning: 214 classical radicals index every character in dictionaries, and most characters (around 80%) are phono-semantic compounds — one component hints at the sound, another at the meaning. Each character page here decomposes the character into its components, animates its stroke order, and lists the sound-family siblings that share its phonetic part.
How many Chinese characters are there?
It depends on what you count. Unicode encodes about 97,000 CJK characters, but that includes archaic and rare forms. China’s official 通用规范汉字表 (Table of General Standard Chinese Characters) lists 8,105; roughly 3,500 of those cover virtually all everyday text; and the current HSK 3.0 exam syllabus expects 2,999 characters across its nine levels. This site gives a full page to the 3,726 characters that matter for learners — each with stroke data, readings and vocabulary. If you are curious how these counts compare and which ones you actually need, the numbers above are the honest ladder: 97,000 exist, 8,105 are standard, 3,500 carry daily life.
Hanzi vs pinyin vs Mandarin
Three words, three different things. Hanzi is the writing system — the characters themselves. Pinyin is its romanization: a systematic way to write Mandarin pronunciation with Latin letters and tone marks (nǐ hǎo), used for typing, dictionaries and teaching. Mandarin is a spoken language — the standard one pinyin transcribes. You read hanzi, you type pinyin, you speak Mandarin. Our pinyin converter bridges the first two: paste characters, get the romanization with tones.
How to use this list
The list is ordered by dictionary coverage — how many common words contain each character — which is a practical proxy for how soon you will meet it. Use the filter box to jump to a pinyin syllable (try hao) or paste a character to check whether it is on the list. Prefer a graded path? Work through the HSK levels instead. Once a character is on your radar, its page links to writing practice — print custom tracing worksheets for exactly the words you are learning.