proycon / hanzigrid

Hanzi grids for studying mandarin chinese (tool & output data)

Hanzi Grids

A hanzi grid is a study grid or matrix of chinese characters along with (optionally) pinyin and/or words from the HSK levels. In this repository you will find various study grids, as well as the hanzigrid tool that generated them, and the raw input data from which they were generated. This means you can make your own hanzi grids to learn mandarin chinese!

A full example hanzi grid is shown below, the colour of the chinese characters corresponds to the tone in mandarin, and the background colour gives an indication of the HSK level.

There is also an interactive web-based variant of thee grids where you can click characters to see all HSK words containing that hanzi, and the pinyin and translations:

One available hanzi grid configuration is my own so-called "confusible" ordering, as featured in both of the above previews. In this configuration, I manually attempted to group hanzi that look somewhat similar (like 牛 and 午) and are therefore easily confused. Having these right next to eachother in a grid enables a horizontal learning method where you can immediately judge a hanzi in a context of similar ones. This is a fairly subjective ordering and not necessarily the only or the best one! My confusible set contains roughly 1000 hanzi and includes everything in HSK1 to 3 and various of the higher HSK levels:

• My confusible order hanzi grid for horizontal learning:

  • SVG single page (good for A1 paper)
  • SVG page 1 (good for A4/Letter)
  • SVG page 2
  • SVG page 3
  • raw source (Licensed under creative Commons CC-NC-BY)

Alternatively, you can have grids per HSK level, either in pinyin ordering or frequency ordering, and for different paper/screen sizes, or grids that combine several HSK levels:

• HSK1, pinyin order: single SVG
• HSK2, pinyin order: single SVG

• HSK3, pinyin order:

  • SVG page 1
  • SVG page 2

• HSK 1 to 4, level/freq order: Single page

  • SVG page 1
  • SVG page 2
  • SVG page 3
  • SVG page 4

• HSK 1 to 4, pinyin order: Single page

  • SVG page 1
  • SVG page 2
  • SVG page 3
  • SVG page 4

Related Initiatives

I want to acknowledge the following sites for open work that is related and served as an inspiration for hanzigrid and my confusible-ordered list.

• Alan Davies from http://www.hskhsk.com/ (his downloadable HSK wordlists are a used by my tool)
• https://cnvocab.com/ , there are some nice vocabulary posters here, but they were not quite what I wanted so I started hanzigrid instead.
• Hacking Chinese: Horizontal vocabulary learning in Chinese
• https://horizontalhanzi.com

Hanzi Grid Tool

This is the command line tool that generated the above chinese character study grids, and with which you can create your own study grids.

• SVG images - great for printing, making your own chinese character poster and hanging it on your wall!
• An interactive HTML page (using the SVG images - for study on computers or mobile devices. There's also Javascript/JSON output which you can immediately reuse in your own applications.

The tool is fed a list of input characters (a plain text file), and it will look up each character in HSK level 1 to 6 and draw it on the grid along with additional information. This means you can use it to generate custom grids with exactly the characters you want and in the order you want.

Features

• Characters can be assigned a colour corresponding to the tone (1 - red, 2 - yellow, 3 - green, 4 - blue). Characters that have multiple readings, are neutral tone, or for which no pinyin could be found (if they're not in HSK) are always shown in black.
• HSK levels can be indicated by cell background colour (HSK1-3: white, HSK4: light grey; HSK5: yellow, HSK6: red, not in HSK: dark grey). This may act as a cue for you to skip the character until you're proficient in the lowel levels.
• Example words from the HSK lexicon are shown (up to two in the images). In the interactive form, click a character words in which they occur.
• Showing pinyin on the grid is supported (but not enabled by default)
• Pinyin ordering is supported (not enabled by default)
• The alternative character (simlified/traditional) can be shown in the bottom-right corner of the cell.
• You can determines the columns/rows/cell sizes.

Installation

Familiarity with Python and the command line is assumed if you want to use this tool to make your own hanzi grids, install hanzigrid using pip as follows:

pip install hanzigrid

Usage

See hanzigrid --help

Notes

The interactive page HTML outputted by this tool has to be served from a proper webserver, serving locally from file:/// will not work well!