Learning to write characters is an integral part of learning Chinese, but how do you practise writing them? Do you type? Write on paper? Or… on the canvas of your mind?
Let’s explore seven ways of learning to write Chinese characters!
Whether your goal is to be able to write thousands of characters by hand or just enough to learn how characters work, I recommend that all students learn to write at least a basic set of characters by hand.
This doesn’t mean that you have to focus on the written language right from the start (I, in fact, recommend that you do not), but when you start doing so, handwriting should at least be a small part of your routine.
Tune in to the Hacking Chinese Podcast to listen to the related episode (#271).
Available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube and many other platforms!
7 ways of practising Chinese characters
How should you write the characters? I don’t mean how the characters are composed or what the strokes are supposed to look like, but what method do you use when practising to write them?
There are many ways of writing characters, all with their pros and cons. Below, I’m going to discuss some of them. I will discuss them in terms of their major advantages, how well they will transfer to actual handwriting, along with any disadvantages you should be aware of.
- 7 ways of practising Chinese characters
- Why do you want to know how to write Chinese characters?
- Writing Chinese characters on paper with a pen
- Writing Chinese characters with your finger in your palm
- Writing Chinese characters on the canvas of your mind
- Writing Chinese characters on screen without feedback
- Writing Chinese characters on screen with corrective feedback
- No writing at all, just looking at the Chinese character
- Only reading and typing Chinese characters
- The best way to write Chinese characters by hand
Why do you want to know how to write Chinese characters?
Before we go through the list, it’s a good idea to pause and think about why you want to learn Chinese characters. I’m not questioning your decision to do so, but being aware of what you want to achieve is crucial for choosing the right method(s).
If your goal is to be able to write thousands of characters by hand because you think it’s cool and beautiful, you will need a different approach than if you only want to learn a small set of characters to understand how characters work.
I explored 16 reasons to write by hand in this article, although not all of them are good reasons: 16 reasons to learn to write Chinese characters by hand
The list below will be useful no matter why you’re learning characters and no matter how serious you are about it, though.
1. Writing Chinese characters on paper with a pen
This is the most obvious way of writing and has been around for a while. People originally carved characters into animal bones and tortoise shells, but this would be highly impractical and unethical for the modern learner of Chinese.
The main advantage of writing on paper is that if being able to write Chinese on paper is your goal, it makes sense to practise just that. You can be sure that your practice transfers to the intended use case.
This can be a serious issue. If you practise characters in an app for months, but then realise that the way you learn characters there doesn’t actually enable you to write characters when it matters, you have a problem.
Of course, writing on paper has downsides. First, you need a pen and paper, and a reasonable flat and stable surface to write on. I strongly advise you to use grid paper (you can find all the resources you need to practise here).
Furthermore, unless you have a teacher to check, you also don’t get any corrective feedback, so you could be repeating the same errors over and over.
Still, it’s hard to cheat with this method; if you don’t know how to write something, it will be quite obvious, at least for yourself.
All the resources you need to learn and teach Chinese stroke order
2. Writing Chinese characters with your finger in your palm
This is the natural extension of the above method to be used whenever you don’t have paper and pencil around. For some people, this becomes the main method, especially when combined with spaced repetition software.
You skip the paper and pencil entirely and just write with your index finger on your palm, a flat surface or even in the air. This is obviously more practical because you always have your index finger with you.
The drawback is that you don’t see the characters that you write, which comes with several problems.
- You don’t practise the actual strokes, and your penmanship will likely suffer if you only practise this way.
- You don’t need to care about composition, sizing and spacing. Since you can’t see the result, you have no idea how far away things are from each other or how big they are.
- You might cheat, even without realising it. Maybe you’re just too quick, forgot a stroke or a dot and just moved on. If you made a minor mistake, you’re less likely to find it out, too, even if it’s an honest mistake.
In short, nobody can check your writing, not even yourself. If you care about penmanship, this should be concerning, but if your main goal is to review characters as a more advanced student, this is not necessarily a problem. I do this all the time, for example.
3. Writing Chinese characters on the canvas of your mind
Writing characters on the canvas of your mind is the next step in the abstraction process, and you don’t need paper, writing utensils or even hands to use it. In that sense, it’s the most convenient way to write!
Simply imagine writing the character in your mind. If you’re not very familiar with character components, you might have to do this stroke by stroke, but as you learn more about characters, it works best with just imagining the different components being put into place.
- 好 (hǎo), “good”, consists of:
- 女 (nǚ), “woman”
- 子 (zǐ), “son; child”
- 妈 (mā), “mother”, consists of:
- 女 (nǚ), “woman”
- 马 (mǎ), “horse”
- 因 (yīn), “reason; cause”, consists of:
- 囗 (wéi), “enclosure”
- 大 (dà), “big”
I have written more about how Chinese compound characters work and how to learn them here: The building blocks of Chinese, part 3: Compound characters
Once you have internalised the most common components (all those listed above are very, very common), writing them out stroke by stroke in your mind becomes unnecessary, even a hindrance. You’re trying to remember which components go into the compound, not how to write the components!
So far, so good, but this method also has obvious downsides. It essentially means that you’re not actually writing anything, so while useful for remembering the composition of the character, it doesn’t help you actually write it.
It also assumes that you really do know how to write the components, not just that you think that you do.
I’d say this method is great if your handwriting is already acceptable, you know a thing or two about how the Chinese writing system works and know a couple of hundred components.
In essence, use this method if learning a new character is no longer hard for you, but remembering it long term or keeping it separate from other characters might be.
Writing in your mind is very quick and convenient, and it’s probably the method I’ve used the most over the years.
4. Writing Chinese characters on screen without feedback
There are several apps that allow you to write either directly on a touchscreen or using a stylus or writing tablet of some kind.
Most of these programs don’t offer you any feedback, so in a sense, it’s just a very expensive kind of paper-and-pencil approach.
However, this is not entirely true, because writing on screen allows more direct comparisons to model characters and will thus improve the chances of spotting errors.
A smartphone is also something most people carry around all the time, which isn’t the case with paper and pencil, so I think these programs are quite good. The most common example of this is probably Anki, where you can add a writing canvas.
The disadvantages are mostly the same as for paper and pencil, except for the practical details. If you’re doing this a lot, I recommend getting a mesh tip stylus, which will make writing on screen feel great!
5. Writing Chinese characters on screen with corrective feedback
This method works like the previous one, except there is software running in the background to compare what you write to the correct version of the character.
Some apps do this primitively, where there’s one and only one correct way (whereas in reality, there are often different standards and more than one correct answer; see this article for more).
Other apps, such as Skritter, are more flexible and less frustrating to use. For example, Skritter recognises many stroke shortcuts used by native speakers.
The advantage here is that corrective feedback from the app does away with one of the disadvantages of all the above methods, namely that you don’t know what you’re doing wrong.
If you use an app like Skritter to learn to write characters, stroke order will be mastered without really having to think about it. You don’t need to look anything up, and when you stray from the correct path, the app will let you know.
The downsides are that these apps usually cost money. It’s also possible to cheat, although it depends on how you have configured the app. Read more in About cheating, spaced repetition and learning Chinese, where I discuss Skritter specifically.
6. No writing at all, just looking at the Chinese character
This isn’t a method as such, but it’s something many students do when they are too tired or don’t know any better (I used to do this, too, before I realised how bad it is).
Instead of answering the question: “Can I write this character from memory without seeing it?”
You instead answer the question: “Would I have been able to write the character I’m already looking at if asked to?”
The problem with this approach is that your answer is likely to be inaccurate. It’s extremely hard to determine if you knew something after seeing the answer (hindsight bias, among other things), so you’re likely to overestimate your ability to write the character.
Don’t do this!
This method has no advantages, and it’s only mentioned here so that I can point out that if you want to remember the character, simply looking at it isn’t enough; you need to actively retrieve information from long-term memory.
7. Only reading and typing Chinese characters
Since you don’t really need to learn to write characters by hand for practical reasons, it becomes increasingly common to cut down on handwriting in favour of typing. This essentially reduces the challenge of writing to one of typing Pinyin and recognising the right characters.
You also need to read, of course, because even if you can type using Pinyin, native speakers communicate with characters, not Pinyin.
The advantage of reducing the time you spend on writing characters is that you save a lot of time, which you can use to do other fun and interesting things in Chinese, such as reading. This will certainly have a bigger, positive impact on your language development than spending hundreds or thousands of hours on handwriting. Again, see the article linked to above for a more carefully argued case for this.
The disadvantage with this method is obvious to anyone who has tried it: Reading and typing will not enable you to write characters by hand. If you’re okay with that, then that’s fine, but you need to be aware of it at least.
Even back when I studied Chinese full-time and read 25 books in Chinese and typed a few hundred pages of text in one year, I still spent around 20 minutes per day maintaining and expanding my knowledge about characters!
Forgetting how to write characters by hand, called 提笔忘字 (tíbǐwàngzì) in Chinese, literally “lift pen, forget character”, is a common phenomenon, one made dramatically more common because of digital typing.
In Japanese, there’s another expression for this, ワープロ馬鹿, literally “word processor idiot”, signifying someone who can only type using a computer.
As mentioned above, this needn’t be a problem. Being able to write characters mostly with the aid of digital tools can be a strategic decision.
The best way to write Chinese characters by hand
If you value being able to write by hand on paper, the first five methods mentioned above all work pretty well, but they yield slightly different results and demand different things from you as a learner.
It’s easy to cheat with some methods, but if you’re vigilant and strict when grading yourself, this isn’t a big problem.
Some methods are less convenient than others, but that also depends on habits and routines.
Personally, I use mental writing and Skritter the most. I use mental writing because it’s really quick and I already know how to write the components. I also don’t care about penmanship beyond writing clearly, which I can already do.
I use Skritter because it’s by far the most efficient way to maintain vocabulary I have already learnt; it’s part of my minimum effort approach to writing Chinese characters by hand.
Which methods do you use? Why? Let me know in the comments!
A minimum-effort approach to writing Chinese characters by hand
23 comments
I’m a total novice so pardon my ignorance if I say something foolish… but as I understand it there is a neuromuscular component to character recognition, something I learned about while reading about character amnesia. What I read is that modern ways of writing characters (e.g. Pinyin input on a smartphone) can lead people to forget characters entirely. This might be incidental given that smartphones are new and most people would have learned using their hands… but if the physical act of writing characters is closely tied to character recognition in the mind I’d imagine some of the more abstract methods you list are much less effective than others. Do you think there’s much of a difference for people just starting to learn Chinese?
I’m not sure if you understand your comment correctly, but it’s true that Chinese people forget to write characters and that this is an increasing problem because of the increased use of computers and phones (and a decreased use of actual handwriting). However, it’s not the case that people read less (they probably read more because of the internet) and people will of course not forget their native language if they keep using it. I find the abstract methods listed here very useful (as I think I mentioned), provided that the goal is to remember the composition rather than being able to write the character beautifully/quickly/effortlessly. If that’s the goal, you really need to write. For beginners, I Suggest staying away from the more abstract methods though, you need corrective feedback, preferably both from a program and a teacher.
It seems I may have mixed up recognition and writing in my original message 🙂 thanks for the clarification!
I rely on pen & paper for my basic practice. Early in my lessons, I got to practice with a teacher’s Chinese writing brush & “magic paper” and enjoyed this so much that I got a couple of brushes and some “magic paper” for my own practice. I don’t know if this actually helps, but at least I find practicing enjoyable. I have also found differences in how pencils and pens feel while I practice. I favor Flair felt tip pens for most of my actual pen practice. These felt tip pens behave more like a writing brush than any other pen or pencil I have tried, minimal pressure is needed to leave a mark (just like a brush) and my results look better.
Mostly ink stick, paper and brush, or occasionally a brush pen.
Olle, I can successfully recognize something like 1000 characters. I’m constantly chatting with native chines speakers and use dictionary when I can’t recognize a character. Also I’m able to choose the correct characters while using pinyin to type.
I’m learning Chinese as a hobby, and not interested in writing in Chinese, but mostly interested in listening, speaking and reading.
So, why should I learn how to write? just to avoid recognition mistakes? or to make myself more confident about the different fonts of the characters? I don’t know if it’s worth it. would be happy to hear your thoughts about it.
I would say one of the main advantages is that your knowledge of characters in general will increase quite a bit. Learning to recognise characters is good, but there’s a lot more to know about a character than that. Also, you might know much less about the character than you think, only being able to recognise it in specific words and so on. Naturally, if you ever decide to live or work in China, it will be quite awkward to not be able to write. Still, if you learn Chinese as a hobby and don’t think not knowing how to write by hand is a problem, I seen no serious problems with not learning it. I wrote more about this here: https://www.hackingchinese.com/is-it-necessary-to-learn-to-write-chinese-characters-by-hand/
OK, thanks for your input.
I hope that I can join the pronunciation challenge with the next group soon, because pronunciation is important to me. Already mailed you before about it.
Thanks for having the Blog!
Yes, don’t worry, you’re on my list! 🙂
I’ve given up on handwriting characters. When I started my studies I was super excited about being able to write in Chinese and spent a lot of time just handwriting characters over and over. Several years down the road when I was studying Chinese in grad school it started to really frustrate me that the instructors put so much emphasis on handwriting. It has to be the least practical language skill and yet I found myself devoting many hours to it each week in order to pass the tests. Now I live in Beijing and happily use a computer for all my writing needs!
That being said, I can’t imagine how I would have learned to read all these characters if I hadn’t gotten used to the way they were formed. So, like you, I agree that it is important to at least start out learning to write by hand.
I never had success with any other method than just writing them out repeatedly.
I use methods 1 and 2. Method 3 is I think a precursor to either 1 or 2, but I don’t usually *just* draw characters in my mind. I think kinetic engagement is an important facet of my learning style, so I will almost always write with pen or finger.
Probably the greatest aid to my learning to write characters is one you don’t specifically mention Olle – I endeavour not to use pinyin input on my smart phone, my default is to use the writing keyboard. If I can’t remember how to write a character, but I can remember the sound, I will flip the keyboard to pinyin input where I will easily recognise the character I want. I’ll just glance at it to refresh my memory, then flip back to the writing input to enter it. I think this is a great method of consolidating my writing.
A couple of other points on learning methods and styles:
I love writing characters and have a graph lined notepad and fancy pens that help me make satisfyingly brush-stroke like characters. I’m confident that taking pleasure in the beauty and form of the characters is central to my learning.
My visual memory is much quicker and more solid than my auditory memory, so I use the strong picture I have of a character to lead the learning of the rest: I say the sound and exaggerated tone over and over in my mind as I write, striving to learn these aspects that I find more difficult whilst I enjoy the writing.
As I first encounter characters I make an actual flash card. By now I have a few thousand little flash cards that I’ve made – I write the character or word large on one side (lovely Japanese Zebra brand felt tip pen) with pinyin and translation on the other side. That way I can drill writing, translating into or out of Mandarin, or tones as I choose. I store the flash cards grouped by topic or part of speech.
I work through the flash cards in a sort of contextually driven spaced repetition method of my own devising – eg, “oh, I’ll no doubt need to discuss pregnancy troubles with a friend so I’ll review parts of the body, illness symptoms and emotions before I see her”!! Flash cards of words I know least well go into a little travel box for review on the train (finger writing), waiting in queues etc.
As I’m a self-directed learner I have the luxury of designing my own syllabus to suit my learning style, but I expect a consideration of learning styles would be useful even for learners who do have to cram lists of words for exams. For example, contextual learning is important for me, so I learn characters by using them in words and sentences. My vocabulary lists (flash cards) amass from conversations that are important to me at work and with friends. This experiential and emotional connection as I learn is part of my learning style, as is my quick visual memory, and my aesthetic enjoyment mentioned earlier. Even my manual “spaced-repetition” method is context driven, so I review frequently used words more often.
I saw in the article that it said that you don’t know any other apps like skritter. I found one I am quite happy with that is similar though it is not as gamey or flashy as skritter. It is Tofulearn. I’m not sure if there is an android version. I use it on my iPhone anyway and like it well enough. And it’s free
Hi! Thanks for the recommendation; I’ll check it out. There are several apps that do handwriting these days (I think it was different just a few years ago). Nowadays, the situation is more complex with several alternatives (some of them free) but with lots of other things to compare and take into account. Another free alternative is Inkstone, if you haven’t tried it already.
How about a non-phonetic input method such as Wubi or Cangjie? A friend recently talked me into learning Cangjie, and I have to say that I immediately noticed a boost in my alertness to how components fit together – beyond what writing by hand did for me. With hand writing, I could just go through the strokes, but if I’m going to hit the right keys for Cangjie, I have to seriously think about how the character is actually put together.
I have considered doing that (learning such a method as a way to review characters more actively when typing), but it’s probably a solution that fits a very, very small number of people. I have learnt additional keyboard layouts (Dvorak) and I would hesitate to spend the massive amounts of time it takes to get good with a new layout. Most students will be much better of spending that time learning characters in some other way. 🙂
I have heard some people (non-native speakers) who learnt Cangjie that they ended up not thinking too much about structure after a while anyway, once a certain character became attached to muscle memory and the pressing of a specific combination of buttons. That seems a bit odd to me, though, it seems like if you can type it, you could slow down the process to figure out which buttons you pressed and thus the composition of the character? I mean, I don’t think how to type the words I’m typing now, but typing them certainly means that I could spell them on paper. Not exactly the same thing, but I don’t see why that wouldn’t apply. Do you have any light to shed on this?
How far are you into learning Cangjie? How’s it going?
I learned Cangjie a few years ago and definitely felt it helped with my reading speed & was useful to “get the pinyin out of my head”, but i ended up not doing much typing after a while. I’ve picked it up again and am typing about 30cpm. I haven’t been doing much writing by hand lately, but definitely can feel the characters flow out much smoother now when I do. It is interesting to hear that your other foreign friends typing cangjie feel they stopped thinking about the structure. Maybe that will happen if I get up to 100cpm.
This is something I’d like to dive deeper into at some point. I don’t know what it’s like to type (relatively) fast with a non-phonetic input system, but it’s conceivable that since each key is not mapped to one specific component, it might be that the link is weak enough that you can type without thinking too much of the structure. Typing in English isn’t a good comparison, maybe, but still relevant. I type fairly fast (top speed a bit above 600 CPM) and it’s not as if I think about how the words are spelt when I type, it’s all muscle memory. Obviously, I need to know how to spell on some level, because that determines the order of the letters, but at some point, it starts being a pattern of keystrokes (almost like a chord) instead of individual movements.
Anyway, the main reason I’m probably never going to invest the time necessary to learn such an input method is that there is another way that is also slow (which it would definitely be for a very long time) and is even better for reviewing how to write by hand, and that is… to write by hand. 🙂 On my phone, when writing shorter emails, messages, search strings, notes, etc.. Communicative handwriting, in other words.
Hey Olle. I swear I read you mention it in an article of yours I read recently, but what are your thoughts on the advantage of writing with a pen or stylus vs. with a finger tip. What I remember from this article is you thought there wasn’t any research on this, but that the difference should be minimal in your estimation at the time.
Kindly,
It’s interesting thinking about the benefit to using a system that was helpful in ‘getting pinyin out of one’s head’, in order to boost memory characters by understanding their composition.
In response to Elijah’s thread (八), What if one’s end goal is not to improve writing by hand, but to boost reading comprehension/character retention? In other words, I’m wondering whether writing by hand (incl. stylus/pen/paper vs. finger tip), vs. using a non-phonetic keyboard input, which would be more effective for reading/character comprehension.
Maybe you would have the same conclusion Olle (writing by hand is better than learning new non-phon. keyboard input)?
*Unfortunate I’m not able to comment in your guy’s comment thread. I’ve noticed this every time I’ve commented. Is this an issue for others? I’m in Safari but when I tried with Chrome it’s the same. Maybe it’s a plugin/extension issue if it’s just me experiencing this.
Character learning software such as the Skritter that you frequently recommend almost universally disappoints: it is geared principally to the iOS platform that is prohibitively expensive for most users and its editing of full-form characters is drawn from the error-strewn practices of the simplified character set – practices that contradict good brushwork*, customary usage and the recommendations of the Taiwanese Ministry of Education.
差不多 maybe – but who actually chooses to learn from substandard sources? 🤷♂️
*(Increasingly important since the introduction of the pen-brush.)
I don’t think it’s my job to say what students can and cannot afford. Rather, I want to present what options there are, and I always include a range of options, including Anki, which is free on all platforms except iOS. Some people have money to invest, others do not, but I don’t see why I shouldn’t recommend paid solutions just because some people can’t afford them?
Also, could you be a bit more specific regarding traditional characters in Skritter? It’s my experience that Skritter has very good support for traditional characters compared to most other apps, considering that almost the entire team either live in Taiwan or has a study background at least partly related to Taiwan.
The main drawback is that standard Taiwanese Mandarin pronunciation is not supported very well, but that will hopefully change in the next version of the app. In what way does the app “contradict good brushwork, customary usage and the recommendations of the Taiwanese Ministry of Education”?
Since I’ve worked with this specific aspect of the app, I know that most traditional characters do follow the MoE standard. Naturally, there are thousands of characters and tens or hundreds of thousands of words, so not everything is correct, but the most commonly used language is almost certainly correct (and if it isn’t, we’d like to know)!
As I don’t have access to Skritter, here is an example from a useful website that I used to patronise, for the common character 國.
http://www.yellowbridge.com/chinese/character-stroke-order.php?word=國
The result is similar to that in Pleco and Hanping Chinese Dictionary.
Stroke order for full-form characters is about as trustworthy as Chinese ‘historic’ films. 😅
I used YellowBridge as a student way back, but the site is unusable without an ad blocker these days, and their character analysis is not reliable enough. I see zero reason to use it over other free sites like Zi.tools.
The stroke order for 國, and most other traditional characters, in Skritter is certainly correct, and I dare say the top 5,000 characters are reliable (at least). Just to clarify, you said “Character learning software such as the Skritter that you frequently recommend almost universally disappoints: it i”, but you actually meant in general and just mentioned Skritter as an example, without having checked it? We do care quite a lot about character accuracy and reliability, so if something isn’t right, we’d like to know!