Games and Physical Tools

Q: Do I have to buy anything for games and tools?

No. This site covers the same ground for free — Every game on this site, free, 成语接龙 idiom chain, free, Free HSK flashcards, all six levels — and those pages need no account and cost nothing. The items on this page are for the things a website cannot be.

Q: Are these ranked by what they pay you?

No, and they structurally cannot be: the data record behind a recommendation on this site has no field for a commission, a rate or a partner, so the ordering cannot follow the money. Every item is ordered by who the reader is.

Q: Why is there no price shown?

Because we have no licensed way to keep a price current, and a stale price on a page like this is worse than none. Cost is shown as a band instead — budget, mid-range or premium.

Board games, card decks and desk kit that put Chinese in front of you when you are not studying.

Free on this site, right now

There are around forty free games on this site and none of them need anything bought. What a physical object adds is presence: a board on the table gets played when an app on a phone gets ignored, and someone else can join in, which is the single biggest predictor of whether a hobby survives its first year. That is the whole case for this category and it is worth being clear about, because much of what is sold as a Chinese learning game teaches nothing.

The test we applied: does using it require you to read or say Chinese? A mahjong set does — the tiles carry numbers and suits you must read at speed. A xiangqi board does — the pieces are characters. A set of pretty character postcards does not. Anything that works equally well with the Chinese ignored is decoration, and it is not on this page.

Every item below says what it does not do. Nothing is ordered by what it pays — see how this page is written.

Show:

Showing every level in this category.

Beginner Mid-range

Mahjong set (Chinese tiles)

various makers

The best numbers drill anyone has ever built, and it was not built to be one. Every hand forces you to read 一 through 九 and the three suits at speed, dozens of times, under mild competitive pressure — which is precisely the condition under which recognition becomes automatic. It is also the most socially useful thing on this page: mahjong is played across the Chinese-speaking world, and knowing it opens doors that a vocabulary list does not.

What it does not do: The vocabulary it teaches is small and specific — numbers, suits, a handful of calls. You will not learn a sentence from it. Rules vary enormously by region, so expect an argument about scoring with anyone who learned elsewhere.

Free here first: Learn the numbers here first, free

Look it up on amazon.ca

Intermediate Budget

Xiangqi (Chinese chess) set

various makers

Every piece on the board is a character and you cannot play without reading them, which makes this the rare game where the Chinese is load-bearing rather than decorative. The set is also a small lesson in itself: the red and black sides use different characters for the same pieces — 馬 and 傌, 車 and 俥 — which is a vivid introduction to how homophone pairs and traditional variants work. Cheap, durable, and it plays fast.

What it does not do: Traditional characters, not simplified, so a few pieces will be unfamiliar if you have only studied the mainland forms. It teaches about a dozen characters in total — this is a game you will enjoy, not a study method.

Free here first: Simplified ↔ traditional converter, free

Look it up on amazon.ca

Beginner Budget

Chineasy flashcards and Chineasy Everyday

ShaoLan Hsueh

Characters drawn as the pictures they descend from — 火 as a fire, 人 as a walking figure — then combined to build compounds. As a teaching system it is limited, and its fans oversell it. As a thing to leave on a coffee table where a sceptical partner or a bored teenager will pick it up, it is unmatched, and a learner who grasps early that characters are built from reusable parts has understood the single most important fact about the writing system.

What it does not do: The pictographic story only genuinely works for a couple of hundred characters; past that the illustrations become inventions, and a memorable false etymology is harder to unlearn than no etymology. It teaches no pronunciation and no grammar.

Free here first: 101 radicals, properly explained, free

Look it up on amazon.ca

Elementary Budget

Printed HSK vocabulary flashcard deck

various publishers

A pre-printed deck removes the one step that stops people using flashcards, which is making them. Look for a deck that puts the character alone on the front with pinyin, meaning and an example on the back — many put the pinyin on the front, which quietly destroys the point, because you will read the pinyin every time and never test the character. Check the level split matches the official lists before buying.

What it does not do: You did not write these, and writing a card is itself a rehearsal you are now skipping. Print quality and definition quality vary wildly between publishers, and a bad definition on a card you review a hundred times is expensive.

Free here first: Free HSK flashcards, all six levels

Look it up on amazon.ca

Beginner Budget

Small desktop whiteboard and markers

any stationery brand

The lowest-friction way to write a character from memory, which is a completely different skill from recognising one and the one that reveals what you actually know. Because it wipes clean there is no cost to being wrong, so you attempt characters you would not commit to paper — and attempting is where the learning is. Keep it beside the keyboard and write each new word once by hand before closing the tab.

What it does not do: It is a whiteboard. It has no Chinese on it, teaches nothing by itself, and only helps if you build the habit of using it — which most people do not.

Free here first: Draw a character to look it up, free

Look it up on amazon.ca