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Chinese characters or Hanzi are logograms developed for the writing of Chinese. They have been adapted to write other Asian languages, and remain a key component of the Japanese writing system where they are known as kanji. Chinese characters are the oldest continuously used system of writing in the world.

Have you ever wondered what the most common Chinese characters are? In a language of approximately 50,000 individual characters, mastering the most commonly used Chinese characters—and knowing their order of frequency—will benefit you on your path to language greatness.

Whether you’re a new learner ready to begin reading and writing Chinese or a seasoned student brushing up on the basics, learners of all levels benefit from reviewing the most essential Chinese characters. The following list of 100 most common Chinese characters is based on data from classical and modern Chinese writings.

Reading and writing Chinese characters is often considered the most ambitious challenge that language students face in order to achieve fluency. Indeed, the intricacies which have shaped this character system over thousands of years are both complex and vast.

While they may appear bewildering at first, Chinese characters are actually composed of distinct building blocks that form a straightforward and logical structure. Once you grasp a basic understanding of Chinese character anatomy, you will be reading and writing your way across the Middle Kingdom in no time. Explore below and continue along your journey to learn Chinese characters.

Unlike the Roman alphabet, Chinese characters are used to illustrate meaning rather than sound. In fact, most characters were originally intended as visual representations of physical elements like trees, houses or humans. Evolving since their earliest forms, simplified versions of these symbols, known as character radicals, serve as the foundation for contemporary written Mandarin.

Making up approximately 80% of the language, radicals—in addition to Chinese pinyin—are an essential starting point for anyone who wants to read or write fluently in Mandarin. Jump to the list of the 40 most used Chinese radicals and continue learning Chinese characters.

When two or more radicals are combined, they work together to create a single character; the radical on the left indicates the character’s category or meaning, while the radical on the right might indicate its pronunciation. The majority of the written Chinese language is comprised of character compounds, in which several characters are combined to make one word.

How to Learn Chinese Characters
Contrary to what many new students expect, learning the characters is not a particularly hard part of learning Chinese.

In fact, many advanced students of Chinese say that remembering and achieving good oral comprehension of the vocal tones associated with Chinese characters and words is actually the hardest aspect of learning Chinese.

There are a few different techniques for learning characters and which one is best really depends on which one works for you. The method used by Chinese school children is the repetition method. Characters are studied and written down again and again until they are remembered.

Many non-native learners of the language criticize this method as outdated and inefficient. However, this is the method used by the Chinese people, almost all of whom learn more characters than the vast majority of non-native speakers of Chinese ever manage to learn, which is a statistic that makes it hard to criticize the method.

Another method—one that is quite popular with Western students of Chinese—involves attaching a story to each character. The story may be based on the appearance of the character or how the character is constructed from different radicals. The theory is that a story is easier to remember than an arbitrary shape.

Take the character 吗 (ma) shown below as an example. This Chinese character has the same meaning and use as the question mark does in English, except that in Chinese, the question mark is not silent, but is spoken at the end of the sentence. It is pronounced “ma.”
Most Chinese dictionaries include about 20,000 characters, though linguists estimate literate speakers know between 5,000 and 8,000. For language learners, being familiar with just 2,000 to 3,000 characters will give you the tools to read most newspapers and magazines.