Hanzi Steps — Learn Chinese, one character at a time

Hanzi Steps · a small step-by-step Chinese reader for English speakers.

Pronunciation uses your browser's built-in Mandarin voice (zh-CN); Cantonese voices (zh-HK / yue) are never picked. Sign-in and the course unlock are live; payment and cross-device sync are coming.

Dictionary data from CC-CEDICT (CC BY-SA 4.0) · stroke data by Hanzi Writer.

Fonts Inter and Noto Sans SC (SIL Open Font License 1.1, via Google Fonts) · pinyin-pro (MIT) · hanzi-writer (MIT code; stroke data from Make Me a Hanzi, Arphic Public License) · OpenCC (Apache-2.0, build-time only) · sentences from the Tatoeba project (CC BY 2.0 FR) · character and word lists follow the official HSK syllabi.

Logo: 漢 and 字 in Shuowen small seal script, from Wikimedia Commons (public domain).

字形演变 · 甲骨文 / 金文 / 小篆 (oracle bone, bronze, small seal) glyphs from the ancient-script collections on Wikimedia Commons (public domain). 1,650 of the 3,090 characters here have a seal form, 744 a bronze form and 577 an oracle-bone form — the older the script the fewer, because later characters (吗, 她, 很…) had not been invented yet.