Colour is the family a character belongs to — the ten building blocks at the centre and 青. Brightness shows how early you meet it, size how much it builds. Words sit in orbit around the character that starts them. Distance from the centre is how much a character builds; where it sits around the sphere is decoration, not data.
Chinese is built like Lego: a few pieces combine into everything else.
A short film: what the map is showing you, how to move around it, and how to read a character's family.
Chinese is built like Lego. A few hundred building blocks make every character, and characters combine into words. This map shows those connections — it is not a dictionary.
You may have met the traditional way of sorting characters — by radical (部首). A radical is the piece a dictionary files a character under, so you can look it up: 214 of them in the Kangxi system used in Taiwan and Hong Kong, 201 in the mainland's 2009 table. It is an indexing key. There is one per character, and it tells you where to find a character, not always how it was built or what it means.
Chineasy's building blocks answer a different question — not where a character is filed, but how to learn it. They are the pieces that recur across the most characters and that you can hold on to as a picture, so every new character is made of parts you have already met. A building block is often a character's radical too, but not always; and many radicals, the rare or abstract ones, are not building blocks here. This is why the map starts from ten pieces and grows outward rather than listing 214 headings.
The two systems do different jobs and neither replaces the other. Radicals are how you look a character up, and the shared language of teachers and dictionaries across Taiwan, Hong Kong, mainland China, Singapore and Malaysia. Building blocks are the order you learn in. One honest line worth keeping in mind: a building block's story is a way to remember, not always the historical origin. Where the two part company, a character's card keeps them apart — The story is the memory hook; Where it comes from is what scholarship actually says.
Colour is the family a character descends from — the ten blocks at the centre and the other blocks that produce whole families of their own. Characters that come from a purely structural piece take a muted tint of the same colour wheel. Size is how much it builds. Brightness is how early you meet it. Distance from the centre is generative rank — the blocks that build the most sit at the core. Where something sits around the sphere is decoration, not data.
Traditional and Simplified are two writing systems for the same language. Traditional (繁體字) is used in Taiwan, Hong Kong and Macau and is the older form; Simplified (简体字) was introduced in mainland China in the 1950s and is also standard in Singapore and Malaysia. This Atlas gives Mandarin readings in Hanyu Pinyin, and in Traditional view it adds Zhuyin (ㄅㄆㄇㄈ, also called Bopomofo) — Taiwan's phonetic notation. Pinyin and Zhuyin are two ways of writing the same sound, not two different readings.
The two systems are not a one-to-one swap. One Simplified character can answer to several Traditional ones — 发 is 發 fā "to send" but 髮 fà "hair"; 干 is 干, 乾 or 幹 depending on the word — so the Atlas chooses the correct form word by word rather than converting character by character. Where a Traditional breakdown is not yet recorded, it says so instead of guessing. Switching keeps your place and your progress.
Level 1 is the ten most productive blocks. Each level after that mostly uses pieces you have already met; about one character in twenty is an everyday word taught before a rare part of it. Levels 8 and 9 are the wider frequency band — useful, but further from the beginner path.
We are still checking every explanation, and audio is being recorded separately. If something looks wrong, please tell us — that is what this beta is for.
Two things worth knowing about the readings. Traditional entries are checked against the Ministry of Education's 國語辭典簡編本: of the 7,690 entries the dictionary also lists, 7,570 match it exactly. Almost all of the rest differ only in whether an unstressed syllable is written with its full tone (認識 rènshì or rènshi) — a convention we are still settling, and one on which good dictionaries disagree. And the Chineasy story on each card is a way to remember a character, which is not always where it came from; Where it comes from, lower down the same card, is what scholarship actually says.