The Method

A key to Chinese — formatting the Chinese-character world.

Clavis Sinica is an original system for understanding the structure of Chinese characters, built over more than two decades. Its aim is simple: to let anyone — native speaker or not — see the order inside Chinese characters, shifting from "memorising one character at a time" to "understanding whole classes of characters."

The Three-Script Theory

The classical "six scripts" are unwieldy for teaching. We regroup every character into three workable classes:

• Single-body pictographs — primitive forms drawn directly from things; the root of all characters.
• Compound semantic characters — two or more meaning-components combined; structure is meaning.
• Compound semantic-phonetic characters — half meaning, half sound; the vast majority of characters.

This turns characters from "a sea of arbitrary symbols" into a system you can reason about: see the structure, and you see the origin and a clue to the sound.

The Visual Key Method

Look a character up by its visual features — no pinyin, no tangle of radical-and-stroke rules. Ideal for early learners, language students, and anyone tracking down a rare character. If you can see it, you can find it.

The foundation

Behind the system is a dictionary of more than 50,000 characters with per-character structural annotation, and a full pipeline for visualising etymology, imagery and sound. From it we make illustrated dictionaries, picture books, character atlases, and naming services.

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