Both native and non-native Chinese speakers believe learning Chinese involves years of study and is a very difficult language. It is so difficult because it is not evident from looking at a character what it's sound or meaning is. Reading and writing a character is tough memorization, and currently most teachers and students learn these characters by repetitive memorization.

However, there is actually a logic behind how Characters are formed, and there is a sound and meaning element, it's just not clearly explained and presented, until Sunrise method was developed. Many are aware that radicals hold a meaning component, but it is unclear which characters have a sound component. The radical system limitation also requires the user to know what part of the character is the radical. The Sunrise method allows character lookup by any part or component in the character whether or not it is a radical.

You can search a character you already know by sound or meaning, and then add or swap a part or breakdown the character into its components. You can also search a character by splitting it up into it's parts vertically horizontally, or diagonally via inputting spatial layout knowledge. If sound or meaning is unknown, you can input stroke # or spatial to find unknown character.

The sunrise method is particularly good at finding non-digital characters when on the go and not near a computer. Other methods include a camera recognition or handwriting, however, these methods don't assist the learner in memorizing the character sound or meaning, or assisting in writing it without technology. By breaking the character into parts, one can better understand the characters sound and meaning elements, and easily remember how to write it.

There are about 200,000 words which are composed of 3000-4000 characters, which can be broken down into 500 essential element parts. Once these parts are learned, the combination of sounds and meanings will easily find the unknown character. With spatial technology, a user can now search an unknown character by just knowing a few hundred characters and/or parts.

That is character leverage of 5-10x and once characters core meaning and sound is mastered, one can learn words with a leverage of 50-70x

In short if you see a character you don't know, you can input any of the following data: stroke #, sound, meaning, or spatial knowledge.

To use this app, the user should have basic knowledge of counting strokes and pinyin (sound) background.

This app is useful to those who have learned Chinese for 3 months or more. For those who know zero Chinese, spatial layout and stroke count, or searching by English meaning is the best way to start learning.

Enjoy the character learning/searching adventure, and if there is any way we can improve on it, please email us at sunrisemethod@gmail.com or visit us at www.sunrisemethod.com or sunrisemethod.wordpress.com. We also have a facebook group. Search "sunrise method"