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 items within our optimal order that meet two conditions for your lessons.

All dependent items are familiar

The first condition that must be met is that a given item’s dependent items must all already be familiar items. In line with our bottom-up philosophy, we believe that one should not learn an item until one is familiar with all of the elements within it.

Under new item limit for type

The second condition that must be met is that the user must not be at the maximum new item limit for that category of item. This is to prevent you from having too many sound or component items in your lessons but very few characters or words.

We have three different category of items, along with their default limit of maximum number of new items:

• components and sounds - 30 max new items
• characters - 30 max new items
• words - 30 max new items

You can read more about our rationale for having a maximum number of new items on the new items documentation page.