Ambiguous characters I found some characters, that look extremely similar to each other, like




Character
Pronunciation
Meaning




士
shi4
scholar/warrior/knight


土
tu3
earth/dust







Character
Pronunciation
Meaning




于
yu2
(surname), in/at/to/from/by/than/out of


千
qian1
thousand, a swing


干
gan1/gan4
dry/to concern/shield, to work/to do/to manage, manage/stem




Is this a real language phenomenon? What is the name of it? Can I get a list of such &quot;homonim sets&quot;?
There are some examples like that, but it's actually not that common, considering there are thousands of commonly used characters, and there's no name for this too (won't call it a phenomenon either).

熱 &amp; 熟: I remember these words from my childhood. I thought they look so similar at that time. Notice I was a native speaker and already speaking Chinese fluently. This is just a part every Chinese learner must learn, and you will certainly get better at recognizing the differences as time goes on.

Those differences may be in a certain stroke (e.g. one character has an extra stroke 大 &amp; 太, or a difference in length 士 &amp; 土, or a difference in angle/order of strokes 千 干), or there are parts of those characters that are different (e.g. 熱 &amp; 熟).

It might help to learn the basic strokes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stroke_(CJKV_character)?oldformat=true#Basic_strokes

Stroke orders matter too. Notice the first strokes of 千 and 干.


check stroke order here: https://www.chineseconverter.com/en/convert/chinese-stroke-order-tool


Here's a list of similar characters if you're interested: http://carlgene.com/blog/2016/06/top-258-most-commonly-confused-chinese-characters/