WHY FREQUENCY
MATTERS
Not all characters are created equal. Some appear in nearly every sentence while others are rare. Learning by frequency gives you the fastest path to reading fluency.
THE HANZI.COOL METHOD
We focus purely on character recognition—the ability to see a character and recall its pronunciation and meaning. This is the foundation for reading fluency.
The philosophy of hanzi.cool draws from jazz music: confident, exploratory, and deliberate. Jazz musicians practiced scales and standards obsessively to achieve improvisational freedom.
Similarly, drilling high-frequency characters builds the foundation for fluid reading. You're not memorizing arbitrary symbols - you're internalizing the core vocabulary that unlocks authentic Chinese texts. Stay cool, practice your scales, and absolute creative fluency follows.
JUN DA'S RESEARCH
Professor Jun Da of Middle Tennessee State University analyzed millions of characters from modern Chinese texts—newspapers, novels, academic papers, and online content—to determine exactly which characters appear most often.
His corpus-based frequency list reveals a striking pattern: a small number of characters do most of the heavy lifting in written Chinese.
THE POWER LAW
Chinese characters follow a power law distribution. The most frequent characters appear exponentially more often than less common ones.
This means that learning characters in frequency order gives you dramatically better returns on your study time compared to random or textbook-based ordering.
COVERAGE BY LEVEL
Nearly half of all text you'll encounter
Over half of written Chinese unlocked
Basic newspaper comprehension
Comfortable reading of most texts
Near-native reading proficiency