Chinese Character Decomposition
The online Chinese decomposition tool breaks a character down into its constituent parts: its radical, its components and its number of strokes.
Characters are built, not drawn
A Chinese character is not an arbitrary picture to be memorised whole. The great majority are compounds of two parts: one that hints at the meaning, called the radical, and one that hints at the pronunciation. Once you see that, learning stops being memorisation and becomes recognition, and the difference in effort is enormous.
The parts repeat. A character containing the water radical very often has to do with liquid; one containing the heart radical, with feeling or thought. The phonetic half is less reliable, because pronunciations have drifted over two thousand years, but it is still a strong hint: characters that share it usually rhyme, and often differ only in tone.
This tool takes a character apart and shows you its radical, its stroke count and its components. It is worth doing for every new character you meet in the first year of study, because it is what turns a wall of shapes into a system with rules.