Know one character.
Light up its whole family.
青 quietly predicts the sound of 清、晴、請、情… The visual map of traditional Chinese — phonetic families, components, and the words they build.
The 188 most useful characters, free — a complete first star chart.
All 3,000 characters · $17.99 once · what’s in the full map
Also on iPhone — free to start, with its own in-app unlock.
Live from the map — hover a star, clicktap a star twice to explore it.
Honest about every link
清 qīng · sound from 青 · 89%
Every phonetic link states its confidence, computed from how well the readings agree and how reliable the family is. No competitor tells you when a link is weak; we’d rather you trust the strong ones. See it on the card →
We measured whether any of this holds up: every phonetic family, ranked →
Every mark pays out words
Say you know star chart 1. Mark 頭 tóu (head) —
…and watch what it unlocks.
A word unlocks when you know every character in it — the same arithmetic the map runs on every mark.
Paste anything — see what you're missing
The free chart gives you 8 of the 28 distinct characters here — and the map knows exactly which 20 you’re missing. Make it a study set →
Buy it once. Own it forever.
Free, forever
- Star chart 1 — the 188 most useful characters
- The family heads those characters point to
- Night-sky progress and your own study sets
The Full Map
$17.99 once — no subscription
- All 3,000 characters and 12,000 words
- All 16 star charts — 99.7% of everyday text
- Works offline · no account · every base-map update
Delivered as a license key by email — works in any browser. The iPhone app sells its own unlock through the App Store.
“I couldn’t find the map, so I built it. This is the tool I wanted on the MRT with my phone in one hand: tap a character, see its family light up, understand why it looks and sounds the way it does.”