About Chinese Character Story

Chinese Character Story is a small independent project for people learning Chinese through English. We make short videos that each explain one Chinese character, and this website gives every character a page of its own with the video, a short written explanation and a quiz.

What we cover

One character per page: what it means, how to say it, how to write it, where its shape comes from, and a handful of common words that use it. We started with simple picture-based characters such as 山 (mountain) and 水 (water), because their shapes are the easiest to connect to their meanings.

How we handle character origins

Stories about where characters come from are easy to make up and hard to check, so we try to be careful:

• When we say a character began as a picture of something, we have checked that against a published reference (the glyph-origin notes on Wiktionary, which cite standard scholarship).
• When an explanation is the customary one but cannot be proven, we say "traditionally explained as".
• When something is only a trick for remembering the shape, we label it "Memory aid" on the page and say "think of" in the video.

If you spot a mistake, please tell us. See the contact page.

How the videos are made

The scripts and page text are written and checked by us. The illustrations in the videos are AI-generated images, and the voices are synthetic: an English text-to-speech voice for the narration and a Mandarin text-to-speech voice for the Chinese. The animation from picture to character is drawn by us on top of real stroke data, so the strokes you see are the strokes you should write.

Sources and licences

• Stroke shapes and stroke order: the Make Me a Hanzi data as packaged in hanzi-writer-data. The stroke data is derived from fonts by Arphic Technology and is distributed under the Arphic Public License.
• Oracle-bone forms: SVG images from Wikimedia Commons, marked there as public domain.
• Glyph origins: checked against the "Glyph origin" sections of the English Wiktionary entries for each character.

Privacy

This site is plain static pages. It sets no cookies and has no sign-up. The quiz is marked in your browser and your answers are not sent anywhere.