5,100 Chinese Characters

Comprehensive Coverage

The duiduidui! dictionary includes 5,100 unique Chinese characters, covering everything from the most common characters used in daily conversation to specialized characters for advanced reading. Every character has an individually curated difficulty score, measured against our written scoring rubric: complexity, usefulness, and real-world frequency all weigh in, but the rubric's guiding question is what learning the character lets you do that you couldn't do before. The result is that you always learn the most useful characters first.

Many characters are homonyms with multiple meanings depending on context: 面 (miàn) can mean "face" or "noodles," among other senses. The dictionary handles disambiguation gracefully, with over 1,100 alternate-sense entries that give each meaning its own definition, examples, and difficulty score. You'll never confuse two senses of the same character, because the app treats them as distinct items to learn.

Rich Character Entries

Each character entry includes:

• Pinyin with tones: accurate pronunciation with tone marks
• English definitions: clear, contextual translations
• Difficulty score: a precise ranking that positions the character in your learning path
• Radical and component breakdown: see what building blocks make up each character
• Compound links: every word and phrase that contains the character, so you can explore outward from any starting point
• Cultural notes: usage context, connotations, and regional variations

Compositional by Design

Chinese characters don't exist in isolation. They combine to form words, and words combine to form phrases. The duiduidui! dictionary encodes these relationships explicitly. When you look up a character like 好 (hǎo, good), you can see every compound it participates in: 好吃 (hǎochī, delicious), 好看 (hǎokàn, good-looking), 好听 (hǎotīng, pleasant-sounding). Learning the parts gives you a head start on every whole that contains them.