In Chinese, most characters are built out of roughly 100 “building blocks.” I designed a program on my computer and then started prioritizing the most common and useful building blocks.

If you stop a random person on the street in China, there’s a pretty good chance their surname would be either Wang, Li, Zhang, Liu or Chen. That’s because those are the five most common ...

For reference, common Chinese characters are made up of nine strokes on average. This is a huge leap in efficiency. (Valenti, by the way, was a Chinese translator during the Vietnam war, ...

A steel sculpture consisting of the characters of more than 3,000 Chinese surnames is seen in Shenyang, Northeast China's Liaoning province. XIAO SHENYANG/CHINA DAILY The most common surname in ...

Mandarin Chinese is the most common language in the world, estimated to be spoken by more than 1.2 billion people in countries like China, Hong Kong, Singapore, Taiwan, and Malaysia. With so many ...