In Chinese, words can be composed of multiple characters. This project aims to visualize connections between commonly used Chinese characters - what words are they usually a part of or are they more commonly used individually? How do they combine with other characters to create new meanings?

Background
Radicals are parts of a character that can lend the character phonetic and/or semantic meaning. For example, the heart radical, which can appear as 心 or 忄, appears in both 念 - meaning "to think, recall" - and 忘 - meaning "to forget." Both characters relate to internal actions or feelings, and the heart radical generally indicates a word related to thoughts or emotions. Sometimes, a radical by is already a complete character.

Pinyin is a system used to specify how to pronounce characters. It uses the Latin alphabet together with tones, which further specify how a character should sound. There are four basic tones, labeled 1 through 4, corresponding to a word's vowel sound is flat, rising, falling-rising, or falling. There is a also a fifth tone that is neutral or toneless - there is no clear tone in these pronunciations. For example, the pinyin "li4" indicates a pronunciation like "lee" but with a downwards, falling tone.

A character can have multiple pronunciations, often corresponding to different definitions. The pronunciation is usually decided by the context.

Sources
This project uses the SUBTLEX-CH dataset, which has the commonly used words in movie subtitles. The frequency of words in subtitles is believed to be a good reflection of the frequency of their usage in general. There were nearly 100,000 words in the dataset, but only the top ~500 are included in this visualization. These 500 words each occurred over 7000 times in the movie subtitles analyzed, and together they involve 400 unique characters.

Information on radicals, pinyin, and definitions of words and characters is taken from the dictionary by Make Me a Hanzi and from the CC-CEDICT dictionary Chinese to English dictionary. The CC-CEDICT dictinoary was read with the help of this parser.

There are over 50,000 characters in the Chinese language. They serve as the building blocks of words, combining in all sorts of ways to create new meanings. Each character has a radical and Pinyin pronunciation - you can learn more about these in the About page in the sidebar.

Main Graph
In this visualization, each circle represents a character, and a link between two circles means they combine to form a word. The size of the circle indicates how frequently the corresponding character is used - whether it be by itself, or as part of a word.

You can...

• Hover a node to see basic information on the character, as well as highlight neighboring characters
• Click on a node to learn more about it in the info panel on the right
• Drag nodes to better see connections

Info Panel
The info panel gives detailed information on a character, including:

• Pinyin pronunciation
• Meaning
• Radical, meaning, and other characters with the same radical
• Words that the character appears in

You can...

• Highlight all characters with the same radical as the one you've selected
• Hover over words the character appears in to see the other characters in the word

Sidebar
Using the sidebar on the left, you can...

• Open this instructions page or the about page, which gives more information on Chinese and this project
• Turn on/off the information window that appears when you hover over circles
• Turn on/off text labels on large circles
• Change how many common characters are shown, sorted from most to least frequent
• Reset the view of the graph to the original state