Four single-screen tables that answer one question each and are worth bookmarking rather than reading: the pinyin grid, the Kangxi radicals, the tones, and a converter for the units Chinese actually uses in a market.
Without a plan: All four, with no account
The pinyin table
Every legal syllable in Mandarin, laid out as a grid of initials against finals. The useful thing about seeing it whole is how much of the grid is empty: Mandarin permits only a few hundred syllables, and most imaginable combinations do not exist.
That is a reassurance rather than a trivium. The sound system is small and closed, so the job is finite — and when you mishear something, the table tells you what it could actually have been.
Tones
The four tones and the neutral one, with audio, plus the rules that change them in context — a third tone before another third tone, and the two words that shift depending on what follows.
Worth returning to rather than reading once. Most learners meet the tone-change rules early, do not need them yet, and then hit a sentence a year later that only makes sense with them.
The Kangxi radicals
The classical set of components that characters are indexed by. Knowing them is how you look up a character you cannot pronounce, and — more usefully day to day — how you guess what an unfamiliar character is about before you know what it says.
The periodic table is the best demonstration of that: 金 on a character tells you it is a metal before you have any idea which one. The radical list is the general case of the same trick.
The unit converter
The traditional units, converted both ways: 斤 and 两 for weight, 亩 for land, 里 for distance.
This is the most practical page of the four, because these units are not historical. A market sells by the 斤, a recipe measures in 两, land is in 亩 and distances in older usage are in 里. Someone who converts a 斤 to a pound in their head and then to a kilogram will buy the wrong amount of fish.
How to use them
- Bookmark, do not study — None of the four is a lesson. They are what you open when a specific question stops you.
- They need no account — All four are open, free and have nothing gated on them.
- Every character is tappable — As everywhere else on the site — a tap opens the dictionary entry, so a table is also a way into the dictionary.
Common questions
No. Its value is in showing you the sound system is small and closed, and in narrowing down what you might have misheard.