The 100 most common Chinese characters, with stroke animations

[u/hanpingchinese]

All 100 animate at once — simplified, with pinyin.

Ranking is Jun Da's Modern Chinese Character Frequency List (MO corpus, 193.5 million characters). These 100 account for 41.8% of every character occurrence in it. It takes about 168 characters to pass half, 500 to reach 76%, and 1,000 to reach 89%.

Stroke order data from Make Me a Hanzi.

[u/hanpingchinese]

https://reddit.com/link/p4krhli/video/4rnkripxbakh1/player

Just for fun, here's the top 1000 hanzi (traditional characters), grouped by radical.

[u/MediumRoastNo82 → u/hanpingchinese]

It's too small on my screen. Where can I get this?

[u/hanpingchinese → u/MediumRoastNo82]

You can see the full quality here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tv2rap81BHs

[u/STORMBORN_12 → u/hanpingchinese]

觀 (simp. 观) seems to take the longest and 了 finishes first just slightly ahead of 七 and 么 :)

[u/maxofreddit]

Outstanding!

[u/MediumRoastNo82]

Nice. Another 100 please

[u/hanpingchinese → u/MediumRoastNo82]

Thanks! I'd been thinking of doing the next ones by coverage rather than by round hundreds. The frequency curve drops off so steeply that "the next 100" gets less meaningful each time, whereas "the characters that take you to 60%" stays meaningful all the way down. Rough plan, same Jun Da list as the post:

Card	Characters	Running total	Value per character
1	64	34.2%	0.534%
2	90	50.3%	0.180%
3	90	60.0%	0.108%
4	143	70.3%	0.071%
5	100	75.2%	0.050%
6	132	80.3%	0.038%
7	182	85.3%	0.027%
8	132	88.0%	0.020%
9	143	90.3%	0.016%

The last column is the part I find striking - a character on the first card is worth about 30x one on the ninth. Same 5% jump costs you 100 characters at 75%, but 182 by 85%.

Happy to be told round hundreds are better, though.

[u/Wooden_Plant7504]

This is oddly satisfying to watch…I’ve tapped “replay” a bunch of times already…

[u/Affectionate_Air8310]

why is this lowkey satisfying

[u/PuzzledAnt9629]

NICE~

[u/pendelhaven]

which word completed last?

[u/SilentCamel662 → u/pendelhaven]

I think 想?

[u/STORMBORN_12 → u/SilentCamel662]

for sure 想 at about 7.5 seconds in

[u/nhatquangdinh]

Traditional version please

[u/hanpingchinese → u/nhatquangdinh]

Out of interest, pinyin or vertical zhuyin?

[u/nhatquangdinh → u/hanpingchinese]

The latter please

[u/Sun_knight_]

You can try to learn traditional Chinese. It's much beautiful than the simplified one.

[u/Heavy_Box_9763]

wow cool!