Licenses & credits

This app is built on freely licensed language data. The sources below make it possible: please support them.

Translations & retellings

The story retellings and their English and German translations were produced with the help of AI (Claude Code). Despite spot checking, errors may have slipped through, so if you find a mistake or an awkward translation, corrections are welcome: please get in touch via my Impressum.

Stories

The story texts are original retellings released under CC0; the underlying fables, myths, and classic tales are in the public domain. Each story states its author, source, and license at the end of its text.

Dictionaries

CC-CEDICT Chinese–English dictionary, © CC-CEDICT contributors / MDBG, licensed CC BY-SA 4.0.

HanDeDict Chinese–German dictionary, maintained continuation by Gábor L. Ugray, licensed CC BY-SA 3.0.

ECDICT English–Chinese dictionary, © 2025 Linwei, licensed MIT. Used only to order the results of the English meaning search: a word it suggests is shown only when CC-CEDICT or HanDeDict also lists it.

The dictionary files served by this site are reformatted derivatives of these works and remain available under the same licenses.

Hanzi stroke & character data

Make Me a Hanzi (Shaunak Kishore): character definitions, decompositions, and radicals under the LGPL-3.0 (derived from Unihan and CJKlib); stroke outlines and medians derived from the Arphic PL KaitiM GB and PL UKai fonts under the Arphic Public License (© 1999 Arphic Technology Co., Ltd.). The stroke data served by this site remains under the Arphic Public License.

Handwriting recognition

The dictionary's draw pad matches what you draw against the same Make Me a Hanzi stroke data this site uses to animate stroke order, so its reference patterns remain under the Arphic Public License like the rest of that data. The matcher itself is part of this site. Nothing you draw leaves your device: recognition runs entirely in the browser.

Character frequency

Top-100 chart and coverage statistics use: Da, Jun. 2004. Modern Chinese character frequency list (现代汉语单字频率列表).

HSK word lists

HSK levels and badges are based on the official Hanban / CLEC exam word lists (HSK 2.0, 2012; HSK 3.0, 2021, list transcription via elkmovie/hsk30, MIT).