In Chinese, most characters are built out of roughly 100 “building blocks.” I designed a program on my computer and then started prioritizing the most common and useful building blocks.

In other words, to type a Chinese character is essentially to punch in a set of instructions—a code if you will, to retrieve a specific character. Mullaney calls Chinese typists “code ...

Step 7: Study reading and writing the Chinese characters. Step 8: Watch Chinese movies and cartoons. Step 9: Listen to Chinese radio shows and songs. Step 10: Converse with a native speaker.

The first attempt was vastly different from the keyboard apps today, and centered on how Chinese characters are written. In August 1983, exactly 40 years ago, ...

Traditional Chinese groups all characters according to 214 radicals (simplified uses 189), which are organized based on number of strokes into a chart called the bushou. Each radical is itself a ...

Chinese characters are, of course, all over Hong Kong, and if you visit Japan, you will see some Chinese, which is used in the country’s kanji script.

Embarrassingly, the characters for my Chinese name mean, roughly, “old,” “barley” and “warm.” My personal and cultural histories were messy knots; unraveling them was not as simple as ...

The Trilateral Cooperation Secretariat (TCS) announced recently that the Chinese characters "Hehe," meaning harmony, were selected as the China-Japan-South Korea Word of the Year 2023, ...

The Chinese language is difficult, and perhaps no one has struggled more with it than the inkers and bearers of America’s Chinese-character tattoos. Most infamous was probably the tattoo on ...

The exercises vary in topic and structure, so you won't get bored, or too comfortable. In one lesson, I was asked to match characters with their pinyin (Romanized Chinese) syllables, translate ...

Today is UN Chinese Language Day, a celebration honoring the richness of the Chinese script. The date was chosen to coincide with guyu (“grain rain”), a traditional solar term (half-month seasonal ...