I hope nobody will mind me cross-posting from Chinese Forums, I'd just like to draw people's attention to this:

http://www.chinese-forums.com/index.php?/topic/37687-compiling-a-useful-similar-hanzi-list/

If anyone could contribute even slightly, it'll help to make a useful resource for everyone :)

added a comment on your blog post. Where would you like further comments to go, and how ambitious would you like this list to be? I could see some problems coming from isolated characters, that in the context, probably wouldn't be confusing.

Any differentiation between writing mistakes and reading mistakes, or all as one?

Oh just thought of another one: 晴 and 睛

This will depend a lot on your level, since only a beginner would have trouble with 夫 and 天, but I'm sure there are plenty of characters that native speakers have trouble with, so (as with everything?!) it really depends. I remember reading in the newspaper once about someone complaining that people can't distinguish between 撼 and 捍, which would be an example of the later, although probably not suitable for learners. Well that also raises another point, since I guess you are just refering to characters that look similar, but there are also of course characters that sound similar, or have similar meanings, all three types could be included though （so to give another example 亳 and 毫）.

I guess you only want traditional characters, but I don't know many so maybe can't help that much, anyway there is a good book on this topic, but for simplified, called 常见易错字辨析手册 available on http://www.amazon.cn/

Anyway, here are some that I find hard to distinguish depending on my caffine intake, although sadly I guess not too useful 2 u...

萧，肃，啸, 潇

堕,坠

拄，柱

托，拖

茂，蔑

劲， 径

泌， 沁

蹭， 赠

踹，揣

摞，撂

馋，搀

狭，挟

When I first started learning Chinese, I remember having problems with 括, 适, 活, and 话. At the time, I wished that I had access to a list of easily confused characters.

But I think ultimately it would have been useless. Because any comprehensive list would have included many characters that I wouldn't recognize yet, and it wouldn't be worth the work to hunt through the list for the characters I knew.

And by the time my Chinese level increased enough that I would be able to use a list, my level also advanced enough that I stopped having problems differentiating
those characters.

A more useful list for me would be a list of characters that suggest the sounds in similar characters. For example:

中 (zhōng) : 冲 (Chōng)， 种 (zhǒng), 钟 (zhōng), 肿 (zhǒng), 忠 (zhōng)

令 (lìng)：铃 (Líng), 零 (líng), 冷 (lěng), 领 (lǐng)

These are called "phono-semantic compounds." A radical suggests the meaning; the other part suggests the sound. Everyone knows the radicals, but I have yet to find a comprehensive list of the most common "sound" characters.

I'm dealing with the very beginner issue by only including characters that you probably wouldn't confuse after a few weeks of studying Chinese. Otherwise every single character with the same radical as another would have to be included.

The list is supposed to contain characters that you could get muddled up even once you're aware of the confusion.

I want simplified, traditional and cross-set confusions!


I'm not sure why you thought those wouldn't be useful, Antimacassar, they're exactly the sort of thing I want! Especially the similar appearance / sound / meaning combos. I've added them to the list.

@atdlouis
That list would be really useful. Maybe it'd be cool to have a go at compiling one as a community project in future.

@atdlouis see the following lists which rgwatwormhill compiled:

http://www.skritter.com/vocab/list?list=40082197
http://www.skritter.com/vocab/list?list=40113735
http://www.skritter.com/vocab/list?list=48513717

James

I studied many characters from those lists, but I found that there were some included from her dictionary which ended up being frightfully rare, so I banned them after I realized. The more common ones from those lists, though, were very useful. At some point I want to write a script to help do this, semi-automatically.