This website was supposed to sell my book, but now I can tell you that you don’t need to buy a book! You can benefit from my hard work when searching for or exploring Chinese characters on this website.

Suppose you want to find all the characters that sound like tong then you can find them. If you want to find characters that look like 童 then you can find them. If you want to build characters by adding other components to 童 then you can find them under Combines with. If you want to find phrases that include 童 then you can find them under Phrases.  You’ll be thrilled that this has characters that start or end with that character.

Maybe you heard the phrase “tongzhi” but you aren’t sure which characters it uses then under tong you will find (ctrl+f) a list of the simple pinyin phrases that sound like “tongzhi”. It turns out that there are quite a few!

The home page has some starting points for any user, including English words and phrases under each letter, e.g. E has words starting with E. There is a list of all the simple pinyin sounds at Search by Sound.

If you know absolutely nothing and the Chinese character just looks like random lines you can still find what you are after, by going to the basic strokes or character components .  You just build up from small to large. If you still can’t find it, there are some characters which are not easy to build.

Anyway, whatever you do, DON’T BUY THE BOOK! Just use the website and remember to bookmark it.