Hanzi is a learning application based on the first 500 characters learned in MIT's Chinese 1-4 classes. Characters are composed of "sub-characters" known as radicals, and they usually have a main radical that defines its pronunciation or meaning - while also serving as a learning tool.

I made Hanzi as the final project for my Information and Visualization Design Studio class (4.032) at MIT.

I have been studying Mandarin Chinese for around 5 years, and the topics I've learned have ranged from ordering food to visiting friends. One of the hardest aspects of learning Chinese is memorizing all the unique characters in the language, so with Hanzi, I aimed to build a review tool to assist in this learning process.

The context of my project is a non-Chinese student learning a new language: Mandarin Chinese. My audience is current Mandarin Chinese language learners, professors, and anyone else interested in the language or language education.

My source data comes from my Basic Written Chinese (Chinese 1 & 2) and Intermediate Written Chinese (Chinese 3 & 4) books. As I was unable to obtain digital versions of the books to parse the data from, I had to manually type the Chinese character data from the books.