The problem with “just memorise it”
To a newcomer, a page of Chinese looks like tens of thousands of unrelated pictures. Traditional teaching leans on pinyin, grammar drills and rote repetition — effective for some, exhausting for most. Learners spend years and still feel locked out.
The insight: characters are constructed
Chinese characters are not random. The oldest ones are little pictures of the world — and almost everything else is built by combining them. Once you can see the parts, the whole stops being frightening.
Sun beside moon makes 明 — “bright.” The logic is visible, if someone shows you where to look.
Three kinds of characters
Clavis Sinica is built on the 楚氏三书说 (the Three-Script Theory) — a clean, teachable replacement for the two-thousand-year-old 六书 (“Six Scripts”) classification. Every character falls into one of three honest, operational types:
Pictographs
Single-body characters drawn from the shape of a thing — the building blocks.
Semantic compounds
Two or more meaning-parts joined so their senses combine into a new idea.
Semantic-phonetic
One part hints at meaning, another at sound — the largest group by far.
The Visual Key 视觉检字法
If characters are built from visible parts, you should be able to find and type one by what you see — not by knowing its pronunciation first. That is the Visual Key Method: a framework-coordinate system that turns each character into colour-and-position modules and, with AI, carries a learner straight from recognising a shape to typing the character. Complete beginners can type Chinese within minutes, across 80,000+ simplified, traditional and variant characters — what you see is what you get.
What’s inside
Clavis Sinica is the digital library built on these ideas: a deeply illustrated character dictionary (with 14,941 original character images), structured reference works, and printable learning workbooks — for self-learners, families, teachers and institutions.