Similar hanzi list and Anki deck

Similar Chinese characters cause problems for every learner of the language. Hanzi are a complex enough writing system as it is, without throwing in little hurdles like 日 and 曰 being totally different things.

With that in mind, I’ve compiled a pretty hefty list of similar hanzi (and similar hanzi components). It’s heavily sourced from here and here, but there’s quite a lot of other material in there too. I want to keep editing it to get it as useful as possible.

You can download the list here:

• similar-hanzi.csv (8Kb)
• similar-hanzi.ods (31Kb)

If you have any additions, corrections or objections, please share them in the comments!

I’ve tried to edit the Wiktionary list to remove unhelpful entries and add in missing ones. If an entry seems too obvious, bear in mind that they might appear as small components in characters and then be easier to confuse.

In other words, some pairs might be easy to mix up in some contexts for some people.You can easily delete them from your copy of the Anki deck if you don’t feel the need to study them.

Having said that, some of them may be useless, so please point out those you think can reasonably be removed from the list (taking into account complete beginners and very advanced learners of Chinese). Telling look-alike characters apart gets easier once you have written them, and there is free tracing and writing practice for HSK 1 characters on Chinese Boost.

The list is arranged in pairs. This might seem an odd way to arrange it at first, as it doesn’t allow longer sequences of similar hanzi to be grouped together. Each pair is distinguished by a ’label’, which is usually pinyin unless the pinyin is identical for a pair, in which case a single-word meaning is given for each item.

But there is a big advantage in the consistency of grouping by pairs. It makes the data much easier to organise, edit and work with, particularly when it comes to automating tasks with it. It also makes it easy to import into Anki, which I’ve already done for you :)

And here’s the list as a huge HTML table (↓ skip to end ↓):