Chinese Radicals

Learning Chinese is hard, they say, but it is made easy with this method of reading Chinese. Chinese Radicals is a simple program that teaches the user, in an interactive way, the 215 radicals used in Simplified Chinese. It uses advanced spaced repetition techniques to make learning faster and more intuitive.

I think learning Chinese is hard, but only learning to read it, should be a lot simpler. Pronunciation and learning words is just hard for people from completely different languages. However, learning the meaning of the Chinese characters should be relatively simple, especially if you forego how to write them.

Under the hood in will keep a set of 30 or so characters it is working on for you. If you know a radical directly, i.e. by typing it, you get one point. If you do not know the radical at first, you can press the go button without entering anything and you get a multiple choice. If you get the right one here, you get zero points. If you do not get it right you get -1 points. The points are added to your score for this radical. As soon as you have three points, the radical is thrown out of the current active set and replaced with a random new one.