Learnhanzi.com is made for people working on learning Chinese characters, like myself. I'll put things here that I myself find useful and interesting and I hope it can be useful for others too. For now there are two applications here: the flashcards and Pinyinhai, a game for mobile phones. Since I think learning by playing games has a great potential, I'll keep on working on that track and hopefully I will be able to add more games here later.

I can be contacted at jonas.nordling@learnhanzi.com. Feel free to come with suggestions or opinions about the site and its content.

Being a linguist, working as a software developer and teaching chinese as part-time job, Learnhanzi.com is my favorite pastime.

Good luck with your studies!

To learn Chinese characters is a task that takes a lot of work and dedication, no doubt about that. But it's not impossible and it doesn't even have to be difficult or boring! The right tool can make the difference. So what makes a good learning tool? As Learnhanzi.com aims to provide tools for studying and practicing Chinese characters I believe in a couple of principles that I will try to follow.

Easy to use

Learning tools should be fun to use. Your brain wants to have fun ALL THE TIME (when not in deep sleep). If it doesn't have fun it will do its best to be somewhere else. There really is no need for or excuse for boring learning. So what's so fun about something like hanzi flashcards? First let's make it clear: The motivation to learn must come from yourself. If you really don't want to learn, don't waste your valuable time trying, spend it on something else. For a flashcards application to be fun to use it should be fast and intuitive, easy to use. And it should give you lots of good feedback. Which leads us to the next principle:

Good feedback

A learning tool should be able to give you stimulating and constructive feedback. It should be able to tell you something about your practicing session, such as what mistakes you made, with as much relevant detail as possible. An even better feedback will also be able to tell you something about your progress and where you are in the learning process. This requires our next feature: individualized exercise.

Individualized content

To get a good learning tool you should have content that is specific to your level. There are two levels of individualized content. The first level is that you get to practice on characters that belongs to your particular course.

The next level of individualized content is keeping track of your every single result when practicing. This makes the tool, like flashcards, able to always give you exact the characters that you need to work on. This will also make possible feedback that shows you your current level of character recognition. The two levels of individualized content can be combined, so that you can choose to practice on course material or on a larger set of characters, but always will have your status on any individual character remembered for you!