Item lesson order

HanziHero has an optimal Chinese character learning order that we have developed to help you learn Chinese characters in an optimal way. You can read in depth about it in our page that details how it works and why we think it is optimal.

Here we will briefly cover what the optimal order looks like and how HanziHero selects items from that optimal order for your lessons.

Item order overview

At HanziHero, each item has an assigned position which corresponds to its position in our algorithmically generated optimal order of items. You can think of that optimal order as a long list that contains each of the four types of items: sounds, components, characters and words.

To illustrate, here is the beginning of the current item order as of April 27th 2023.

1  "yu-",
2  "-e",
3  "4",
4  "moon",
5  "月",
6  "w-",
7  "-_",
8  "3",
9  "five",
10 "五",
11 "五月",
...
...

Lesson item selection conditions

HanziHero will select the first unlearned items within our optimal order each time you do your lessons. However, for characters and words, we won’t select them until certain conditions are met.

Characters: all dependent sound/component items must be learned

Character items will only be selected to show up in your lessons if all of the dependent sound/component items have already been learned in your lessons.

We do this to ensure that you know all items that are referred to in the character mnemonic before learning the character.

This behavior can be configured via the character unlocking setting.

Words: all dependent character items must be familiar

Word items will only be selected to show up in your lessons if all of the dependent character items have already become familiar. This means you will need to review each character item multiple times before the related word items show up in your reviews.

We do this because all characters must be thoroughly learned in order to know the pinyin and understand the meaning of any words that contain those characters. This helps save you a large amount time, effort, and frustration.