Hanzi are the part of Chinese that stops most learners. Vocabulary you can absorb from context, but characters you have to sit down and learn, stroke by stroke. The ones you skip are the ones that come back to slow you down in the middle of a page.
The encouraging part is that characters are not arbitrary pictures. They are built from a small set of reusable parts, and once you know the parts, a new character is no longer a new thing. Then FSRS makes sure the ones you learn stay learned instead of fading within a few weeks.
Characters are made of parts, not drawn from scratch
Take 好, “good.” It is not a drawing of anything — it is 女 and 子 combined. Learn the components and a character becomes a combination of familiar pieces rather than a fresh memorisation task. A handful of parts show up again and again:
- 氵 (water) — 河 (river), 海 (sea), 洗 (wash)
- 口 (mouth) — 吃 (eat), 喝 (drink), 叫 (call)
- 心 (heart) — 想 (think), 忙 (busy), 快 (quick)
- 木 (wood) — 林 (forest), 树 (tree), 桌 (table)
When you meet a new character, find the parts before you try to hold the whole shape. Recognising 氵 tells you the word is probably connected to water; recognising 口 narrows it further. The shape stops being a blur of strokes and becomes a small structure you can rebuild.
Sound and shape: the phono-semantic shortcut
Most characters are phono-semantic compounds: one part hints at meaning, another at sound. The sound part is a rhyme rather than an exact tone, but it narrows your guess.
- 妈 (mā, mother) = 女 (meaning: woman) + 马 (sound: mǎ)
- 吗 (ma, question particle) = 口 (meaning: mouth) + 马 (sound)
- 码 (mǎ, code) = 石 (meaning: stone) + 马 (sound)
Learning to spot the sound component is what makes large numbers of characters feel related rather than random.
Stroke order is not busywork
Writing a new character a few times — in the correct stroke order — is one of the fastest ways to hold onto it. Stroke order matters because you end up recalling a character as a short sequence of movements rather than a static image. A static image is easy to confuse with its neighbours; a sequence is harder to lose. Write the character by hand the first time you meet it, then let review do the rest.
Learn in frequency order, and follow your level
Characters, like words, come in frequency bands. The characters that appear in HSK 3 vocabulary overlap heavily with the most common ones, so following the HSK levels gives you a sensible order for free. If you are working toward an exam, our HSK vocabulary and exam plan lays out those levels; the point here is simpler: learn the frequent characters first, and let the rarer ones arrive with the reading that needs them.
Let FSRS decide when to review
Memorising a character once is not the goal — keeping it is. That is the job of the scheduler. FSRS models three things for every card: difficulty (how hard this character is for you), stability (how long the memory holds), and retrievability (the odds you would recall it right now). It schedules each review for the point where your recall has dropped to a target level, usually around 90%.
For hanzi this matters because characters differ wildly in how stubborn they are. A character you blanked on should return within minutes; one you recognised instantly can wait weeks. FSRS handles that split automatically, and it does it with roughly 20–30% fewer reviews than older SM-2 systems at the same retention.
In EnjoyCards you grade each card Again, Hard, Good or Easy, and the next interval is shown on the button before you press it — 10m, 2d, 15d. Grading honestly is what keeps the schedule accurate.
A practical hanzi session
- Learn the parts first. Name the components before memorising the whole shape.
- Write it once, in order. A few correct strokes build the motor memory that survives.
- Add the full card. Hanzi, pinyin with tones, meaning and an example sentence — the format described in building a Chinese vocabulary deck.
- Test both directions. See the character and produce the meaning, then see the meaning and produce the character. Producing hanzi is the harder direction and the one that reveals gaps.
- Review daily and grade honestly. A blanked character is an “Again”; an instant one is an “Easy.”
The tooling that makes it practical
EnjoyCards supports Chinese fully. AI card generation builds each card with the hanzi, pinyin including tone marks, the meaning in your language, an example sentence and its translation. Four question types keep you from faking recognition — recognition, recall (type the answer), listening, and cloze — and new cards lean on multiple choice so early sessions keep moving. Batch mode turns a pasted list of characters into a deck in the background, and because the app is offline-first, a review on a train counts the same as one at home.
If you want a weekly check on which characters have not stuck, the app’s quiz mode builds multiple-choice questions from your own cards. It is a self-test from your deck, not an official HSK exam, so treat it as a gap-finder rather than a score.
To go beyond a flashcard deck, enjoychinese.app’s Chinese features put character learning inside a full Chinese-study setup.
Ready to make hanzi stick? Download EnjoyCards for free, add a character, and let FSRS decide when you see it next. If you want the theory behind the intervals first, read the spaced repetition guide.