Let me take you through various strategies for finding Chinese Characters using https:\\hanzi-explorer.com

When you see a new character or are looking for the meaning of a character or phrase, you may often already know something about the character. For instance, you may know a similar looking character, you may know what it sounds like, you may recognise a component or other parts of the character.

EXAMPLE 1 按

Recognise a component:

1. This character – 按 , you already may know that the right hand part is 安,  is pronounced (ān) or contains the character 女 (nǚ)
2. Use the PINYIN SEARCH button on the home page and select (an or nv) to get a list of all characters that sound like (ān) or get there by first (nǚ) select 女 and Combine with 宀.
3. Click 安 and a page will display 安 and a lot of characters that look like 安.
4. Now, you may see 按 immediately on that page.
5. However, if you again choose the ‘Combine‘ button you will get a list of all the characters that contain安. 
6. There are many ways to find almost all characters.

Start from just a stroke or two:

If you have prior knowledge, look for a single stroke or two in the Components or Basic list from the Home page. Use the Combine button to then build your character.

Other techniques:

• You know the pinyin but not the tone – use 2. from above.
• You hear a word, two characters together, e.g. gong zi, but unsure what it means. Go to PINYIN SEARCH takes you to ‘gong‘, and characters and phrases that start with gong. Find (ctrl+f) ‘gongzi’. You find there are two possibilities: gongzi 公子 gōngzǐ son or 工资 gōngzī wages.
• Translate from English: From home page, scroll down to click the English letter. Scroll down or find the English word and the Chinese Click on each character for more information.
• Is like a character I know. E.g. 熏. You look at it and you think, it looks like重 zhòng and it looks like 黑 hēi. Look up either of those characters, and scan the list of similar characters. You will see 熏 xūn Smoke (ham etc.)  

Find words or phrases:

Click on the Phrases button to take you to words or phrases containing that character combined with another character to form a meaning. If it composes more than one character, click on the word listed and you are linked to the ‘other’ character in the word.

Click on the Combine button to find any other characters that contain that character. Click on the character listed.

Click on the pinyin to go to all homophones.

Go Home:

To return to the Home page press the Red gate at the top or the button called Home

Keep clicking:

Not everything will be clear at the beginning, so keep clicking and exploring.

Example 2

I hear a Chinese phrase. It sounds like gong + zi. Is there a quick way to find?

First go to Home (https://www.hanzi-explorer.com/index.html). Choose Pinyin search. Click on ‘gong’. Scroll down to gongzi. This has two meanings – the context will tell me which.

gongzi    公子    gōngzǐ                son

gongzi    工资   gōngzī              wage

Example 3

See a character 找. It looks like 我 wǒ  which is known, but what is this new character?

Navigate to ‘我‘. Look at the similar characters and find 找 zhǎo .

Example 4 虿

This rare character is two common characters arranged together. You may already know 万 wàn  and 虫 chóng so why not use Component Pinyin. First click on wan then search for chong (or vice versa.) 虿chai leads you to

虿 chài 9 strokes Rare

Scorpion

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.