The Sinograph School

Sinographs — the characters known as hanzi (漢字) in Chinese, kanji in Japanese, hanja in Korean, chữ Hán in Vietnamese — are the one great logographic tradition still in daily use. Because the modern languages are already well served by excellent tools, this school takes the road the others don’t: it teaches the characters classical-first — the literary language they wrote for two thousand years, and the script’s own history — rather than repeating modern-language instruction. The goal, as with every Edubba school, is genuine reading literacy: real texts, not facts about the characters.

Course catalog

• 101 · How the characters work — open: the first five chapters are live. Strokes, components, and the ways a character can mean, with the teaching order computed over the classical corpus itself — real lines of the Laozi, the Analects, and the Changes from the first pages. Prerequisite for everything below.
• Sinograph Addenda — the Character Codex: one reference page per taught character, growing alongside the course.
• 102 · Literary Chinese — planned. The literacy track: the classical written language on real texts, graded from one-line sayings to whole passages.
• 103 · The script’s own history — planned. Reading backwards from the standard forms toward bronze and oracle-bone writing.
• 2xx onward — planned. The characters beyond China: kanbun and Old Japanese, hanja, chữ Hán.

A note on where things stand

The school is newly open: 101 is being written chapter by chapter, and the later courses are the plan, not a promise. If you’d like to see the wider project, go back to the map of writing; thoughts, corrections, or requests for what should come first are welcome on GitHub Issues.