Difficulty Scores
Every entry in the dictionary has a difficulty score — a single number that tells you and the app how challenging it is. This creates a natural learning ladder from the simplest characters to the most complex sentences.
A Progressive Curriculum
The difficulty scale starts at 1 (the simplest characters, like 一 (yī) — "one") and climbs through thousands of levels. You don't need to follow the scale rigidly, but it provides a reliable sense of progression. If you're comfortable with difficulty-50 characters, you know roughly what's coming at difficulty 60, and you can trust that the app won't throw difficulty-500 material at you before you're ready.
Hand-Curated Foundations
Every character has a difficulty score assigned by hand, accounting for character complexity, usefulness in forming compounds, real-world frequency, and how naturally characters build on each other.
Compositional Difficulty
For multi-character words and phrases and sentences, difficulty is calculated mathematically from the difficulty of the components. A word made of two easy characters is easier than a word made of two hard characters — but always harder than either character alone, because there's additional knowledge in how they combine. This means the difficulty scale is internally consistent: you can compare any two entries in the dictionary and know which one is harder.