Transform the Way You Learn Chinese | November 22, 2025

Learning Chinese is often daunting–not because speaking is hard, but because reading and writing have long been a barrier. Traditionally, if you couldn’t pronounce a character or didn’t know its radical or strokes, you couldn’t even look it up. John Wang, a former senior engineer at Microsoft, created the Character Structure Order (CSO) system to solve this problem. Its breakthrough lies here: with just your eyes and a little imagination, you can look up any character by its shape – without knowing a single stroke of Chinese or it’s pronunciation. By matching the form of a character to capital English letters, learners can easily discover its meaning and pronunciation. With the publication of the Chinese Character Structure Order Dictionary, Wang opens a new, accessible path into Chinese learning – making what once felt impossible suddenly simple.