In Chinese, most characters are built out of roughly 100 “building blocks.” I designed a program on my computer and then started prioritizing the most common and useful building blocks.

Most of the ... When I write the character , it not only has a sound, niu, it has a meaning, “cow.” Only a small number of symbols is necessary in an alphabetic system (generally under 50), but a ...

Mandarin Chinese is the most common language in the world ... It’s tonal and has a character-based writing system. Native speakers realize the language is difficult for visitors to pick up ...

Were one to imagine a font containing 70,000 low-resolution Chinese characters, the total memory requirement would exceed two megabytes. Even a font containing only 8,000 of the most common ...

That’s because those are the five most common ... 8,000 characters, which is just a fraction of the total number of Chinese characters in existence. Yet this regulated list of common characters ...