A Fantastic Learning Tool || YiQi Hanzi with Han Characters

A Resource We Love For Learning Chinese Characters

If you are a regular reader of our content you’ll know we are always hunting for excellent new resources to study Chinese and today we have another one to share with you – YiQi Hanzi with Han Characters.

YiQi Hanzi is a new website, created by the person behind the @han_characters Instagram account, one we recommended on our Top Chinese Instagram Channels blog previously.

The lady behind the account is a Chinese native, based in America who goes by the name MC (short for Mengyu Cao).

She has gradually built up a rather large following on Instagram with her eye catching designs.

Upon realising she had a lot of fans on Instagram she made the decision to start up a new brand with this artwork – and so YiQi Hanzi was born!

YiQi Hanzi – A Brief Introduction

YiQi Hanzi – What is YiQi Hanzi

YiQi Hanzi – The Learning Centre

YiQi Hanzi – Pricing

YiQi Hanzi – Other Channels

YiQi Hanzi – FAQ’s

YiQi Hanzi // A Brief Introduction

In her own words this is how MC describes YiQi Hanzi…

YiQi Hanzi creates unique Chinese character drawings to provide the easiest way to learn & memorize Chinese Characters. All the characters are hand-drawing. With award-winning design thinking, it breaks the traditional Chinese calligraphy forms and adds creative drawings to it harmoniously to show the meaning, history, and stories of each Chinese character.

At LTL we discovered Han Characters on Instagram and have been following the account for a while now.

Our team always talk about the lovely designs MC produces so we were delighted to see her bring her brand to life – a step few are brave enough to make.

There are many accounts who admirably build up a large online following. A job not easy in itself. Yet taking that from a social media platform, to a tangible product that people can purchase is another level, but at LTL we are really pleased she’s taken the risk!

In fact, over a decade ago now we saw Shaolan Hsueh make a similar move with her Chineasy designs (ironically enough, with a very similar concept to YiQi Hanzi).

Shaolan never looked back and has made a huge success of her brand since.

She no doubt proves inspiration to MC who will be hoping to make a success similar to that of Chineasy.

Interestingly though, han_characters already boasts nearly 3 times more Instagram followers than Chineasy.

Of course in 2010 Instagram wasn’t what it is now, but with a strong online following already, that is growing continuously, MC has a great platform to make YiQi Hanzi a big success offline as well as online.

Let’s now take a deeper look into what YiQi Hanzi is about and how it can help your Mandarin.

YiQi Hanzi // What Is It?

YiQi Hanzi aims to use beautiful designs to help you memorize characters and radicals.

As mentioned above, the concept is similar to Chineasy, but YiQi Hanzi seems to go deeper into design.

Whereas Chineasy focuses on simplistic and clean design – YiQi Hanzi’s graphics are more in depth and complex.

In my opinion they teach more than Chineasy.

MC says:

“All the characters are hand-drawings. It combines Chinese calligraphy and watercolor together to present the meaning of each character.”

By using pictures to help remember characters, it allows your brain to process them easier, so when reading Chinese you can relate the YiQi Hanzi images to help you remember them.

DID YOU KNOW – In Chinese, there is NOT an alphabet, characters are made up of radicals.

In fact, Chinese characters are incredibly pictorial and once you understand how characters are built and how radicals are used, it makes learning Chinese a lot easier than many people would expect.

Here is a graphic we made showing the most common radicals.

It’s these radicals which MC tends to focus on in her graphics, for example this one, also taken from the YiQi Hanzi homepage:

MC also teaches on YouTube as well, here is an example of one of the videos on her channel:

YiQi Hanzi – The Learning Centre

On the YiQi Hanzi website, there is a link to a learning centre which allows us to get stuck into the characters right on the website.

Here we can go into more detail with features that include:

• Example Sentences
• Stroke Order
• Themes (slang, culture etc)

You’ll come across all of MC’s beautiful designs where each character is broken down and explained clearly and concisely.

I must admit, all of us at LTL are big fans of the way MC creates these graphics.

It’s a great insight not just into Chinese language, but the culture of China itself also.

Some content is free but not all. If you want to unlock the full potential of YiQi Hanzi you’d be best subscribing.

That brings us onto the next point of discussion, pricing.

YiQi Hanzi // Pricing

Currently YiQi Hanzi has a very affordable pricing plan that should appeal to even the tighter budgets.

There are two subscription plans to date:

• Basic – 5.99USD per month
• Premium – 9.99USD per month

In comparison to Chineasy, the basic program comes in at 1USD more expensive per month and the Premium 5USD more expensive per month.

Either way, it’s a reasonable cost for access to plenty of learning materials in our opinion.

You can use YiQi Hanzi for free but as with all language learning apps and programs your hands are tied to certain kinds of content, so to really maximise your learning potential, we’d recommend going premium.

Of course a lot depends on what kind of learner you are:

• Casual Learner? Try the free and see if you like it
• Hardcore Learner? Go Premium
• Just Speaking? YiQi Hanzi isn’t for you
• Interested in Chinese Calligraphy? This is right up your street

YiQi Hanzi // Other Channels

As we’ve mentioned before, MC does a sound job in running multiple channels at once.

We discovered YiQi Hanzi on Instagram, but it’s worth following all the channels as they are so regularly updated and offer different forms of content.

YouTube in particular, brings the brand and characters to life.

Instagram is for more short-form videos and little “quick-lessons” almost.

The website and a subscription can then allow you to go further.

Here’s another preview of the main channels below which you should follow!

YiQi Hanzi YouTube Channel

So there we have it, a great new resource to learn Chinese for 2021 thanks to a budding entrepreneur who has taken her passion for her heritage, transferred it online, and made a brand out of it.

We love stories like this and we hope you find YiQi Hanzi useful.

Have you come across Han Characters or YiQi Hanzi before? Tell us what you think below!

YiQi Hanzi // FAQs

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