Chinese Character Index

Every character on this site, indexed by HSK level and by pinyin. Click any character for its stroke order animation, pinyin, meaning and example words.

Characters indexed: 9565
In an HSK level: 3034
Pinyin initials: 23

By HSK level

If you are following a course or preparing for an exam, this is the fastest way in. Level roughly corresponds to how often a character shows up in everyday text.

By pinyin

Know how a character sounds but not how it is written? Start here. This index covers every character on the site, including the many that are not part of any HSK word list.

The most common characters

Ranked by how often they appear in real Chinese text. If you are just starting, these are the characters worth learning first.

How many characters do you need?

Chinese has tens of thousands of characters, but the distribution is extremely uneven. Around 3,000 characters cover roughly 99% of what appears in modern books and newspapers, and the most common 1,000 already account for about 90%. The HSK 3.0 standard expects about 3,000 characters across all levels.

This index lists 9565 characters — more than an HSK candidate needs, because it also covers characters that appear in the Chinese texts used to build the stroke data.

Keep going

Start with HSK 1 characters HSK 1 vocabulary list Tone trainer