Sinographs 101 · Chapter 10

Reference

Chinese lexicography began as lists too — the Shuowen jiezi organized nine thousand characters by their parts eighteen centuries ago, and dictionaries have kept its habits since. This page is the course’s own small list: every character taught, generated straight from the course registry, so it can never drift out of date with the chapters.

Every character taught in 101

Formation classes are the ones the chapters demonstrated: pictographan early sign that is still simply a picture of the thing it means (a picture worn to strokes), indicative (a mark pointing at the meaning), compound ideograph (meanings stacked), phono-semantic (a meaning half beside a sound half), and loan (a graph borrowed for its sound alone). Origins graded classic carry the standard account; where the account is debated, the chapter taught you the shape, not a story.

55 characters — counted live from the registry — and, because the course picked them by frequency, they cover one of every five characters on a classical page. More important than the count: every FORMATION CLASS the script uses has passed through your hands. A new character can now only ever be a new combination of moves you know.

Conventions used in this course

• Voice: modern Mandarin pinyin with tone diacritics (nǐ hǎo style), never tone numbers — those appear only when the ASCII convention itself is being shown. Every taught syllable is voiced; click any pinyin with a dotted underline to hear it.
• Forms: traditional characters, as the classical corpus writes them; simplified forms appear only as asides, never as the teaching base.
• ▢ in a reading stands for a character not yet taught — a placeholder for your growing inventory, never a gap in the original text.
• Citations: every ancient line on this site carries its Nabu URN (e.g. urn:nabu:kanripo:KR1h0004:001:1a), its source collection, and its license class. Follow the URN and you reach the witness.

Further study

• Qiu Xigui, Chinese Writing (trans. Mattos & Norman, 2000) — the standard account of how the character system is built; this course cites it for every formation-class claim.
• Paul W. Kroll, A Student’s Dictionary of Classical and Medieval Chinese — the dictionary to grow into as the reading begins.
• The corpus this course reads from: the Kanseki Repository (Kanripo), reachable with per-passage licenses through the Nabu library.
• Next in this school: 102 · Literary Chinese — the grammar of the classical language, taught on the same real texts these chapters sampled.

Sources and licenses

Original prose on this page and throughout the course is CC BY-SA 4.0. The classical lines quoted in the chapters come from the Kanseki Repository (license class: attribution) and are cited in place with URNs. Character frequencies were counted over Nabu’s Kanripo mirror — 722 million character tokens — by this site’s own instrument, and the count is committed with the course.