The Character Catalogue uses animations and interactive links to show how characters are constructed from basic components. Students of Chinese and Japanese can use it to explore character structure and see connections between character forms, sounds and meanings.

The Catalogue is not intended to be used as a dictionary. The readings, meanings and word usage examples given for each character are indicative and not necessarily complete. The focus is on "cracking the code" of the character-based writing system, not on teaching specific characters or words.

Please note: The stroke number search function in the Catalogue uses the Chinese version of a character as its default. This means that some Japanese characters cannot be searched for via stroke number, as they are written slightly differently to the Chinese versions. Such characters appear correctly in the Japanese Catalogue and can be discovered via a reading or English meaning search, or via a link from one of their components.