How Chinese works, from the records.
Not lessons: each page here is a view of zimai's full collection (8,243 characters · 125,400 words), and each names its sources.
Sound
Tone contrasts
Mandarin's four tones and Cantonese's six in 16 sets of real characters (12 Mandarin, 4 Cantonese), with CC-CEDICT and CC-Canto meanings.
Open the tone atlas →Mandarin and Cantonese tones
How the customary readings of 8,066 characters line up between Cantonese tone classes and Mandarin tones, from Unihan. Counts, not rules.
Compare the tones →Sound components
2,623 attributed component relations and historical readings: which part of a character carries its sound, with the source of each claim.
Open Scholarship →Shape
Characters by radical
Every character in the collection under its radical: 226 radical indexes, in catalogue order (not frequency).
Browse by radical →Components and structure
Search by parts (parts:氵+青) and follow a shape through the characters that contain it; 737 component pages.
Search by structure →Compare characters
Up to three characters side by side: readings, uses, modern structure and historical accounts.
Compare →Script
One simplified, several traditional
235 simplified characters each stand for two or more traditional ones in CC-CEDICT, e.g. 发 → 發 fā · 髮 fà.
See all forms →Cantonese characters
Characters written for Cantonese words, Cantonese senses of standard characters and the Mandarin ↔ Cantonese word bridge, from CC-Canto and CC-CEDICT.
Open Cantonese characters →