Does handwriting still have a place in modern Chinese learning? Let’s explore 16 popular arguments in favour of writing characters by hand, each critically examined to see which ones truly stand up to scrutiny.
Handwriting is one of the most hotly debated topics in the field of teaching Chinese as a second language.
- On one side, there are those who argue that in a digital society, handwriting offers very little practical value compared to the time it takes to master.
- On the other side, there are traditionalists who believe that writing characters by hand is an essential part of learning Chinese.
Which side you fall on depends on your assumptions about what it means to learn Mandarin and why you are doing so. Click here to check my best advice on learning Chinese characters.
Tune in to the Hacking Chinese Podcast to listen to the related episodes (#256 and #260).
Available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube (link to part 2) and many other platforms!
If communication is your only goal, learning to write by hand takes too much time
If we consider only communicative ability, it should be clear that spending most of your study time on handwriting is unwise. After all, you will almost never need to write characters by hand in everyday life without the help of a dictionary.
By choosing not to focus on handwriting, you can devote much more time to listening, speaking, reading and typing, which will allow you to improve your language skills more quickly.
This is a point I’ve argued in much more detail here: Chinese character learning for all students
Language learning is not only about communicative ability
However, communicative ability is not the only possible goal for learning Chinese.
What about cultural aspects?
What about institutional learning?
What about teaching Chinese?
What about the feeling of inadequacy when you cannot even write a simple note by hand?
What about the joy and relaxation that can come from writing beautiful characters?
True, if we base our evaluation purely on utility, learning to handwrite every word you can say almost never makes sense. But is that not missing the point?
Let us find out!
16 reasons to learn to write Chinese characters by hand
Below, I have collected and organised all the arguments I have found in favour of writing characters by hand.
I will go through them all, first examining whether the claimed benefit genuinely comes from handwriting, and then discussing whether the argument itself makes sense.
Section 1: Practical considerations and functional use cases
- “Writing by hand is sometimes necessary in real life, so you should learn it.”
- “Handwriting is necessary to progress through formal education.”
- “Handwriting is sometimes necessary in professional contexts.”
- “If you can’t write by hand, you can’t talk about Chinese characters well.”
- “Writing yourself makes it easier to read other people’s handwriting.”
- “Knowing stroke order is necessary to look up characters effectively.”
- Section 1: Conclusion
Section 2: Arguments grounded in learning efficiency and memory
- “Writing by hand helps me remember characters longer and in more detail.”
- “The tactility of handwriting helps me remember characters.”
- “Writing by hand makes it easier to distinguish similar characters when reading.”
- Section 2: Conclusion
Section 3: Cultural and personal arguments
- “Chinese characters are a core part of Chinese culture.”
- “You can’t say that you’ve mastered Chinese if you can’t write by hand.”
- “If you don’t learn to write characters, you don’t know what it’s like.”
- “People don’t study Chinese properly these days; we used to write by hand at school.”
- “Being able to write characters by hand is a great way to impress native speakers.”
Or: “Not being able to write can be very embarrassing.” - Section 3: Conclusion
Section 4: Handwriting as a cognitive tool and emotional experience
- “Writing characters is good mental exercise, gymnastics for your brain.”
- “I like writing characters. It feels good or looks cool.”
- “Writing characters is meditative and relaxing.”
- Section 4: Conclusion
- 16 reasons to learn to write Chinese characters by hand
- Handwriting in Chinese is not a simple either-or question
- References and further reading
If you think I’ve missed an important argument, please leave a comment! Actually, there are already 18 reasons because of comments sent in by readers and listeners!
Section 1: Practical considerations and functional use cases
“Writing by hand is sometimes necessary in real life, so you should learn it.”
This may once have been true, but in a digital society, the reality is that you are almost never required to write by hand beyond your name and perhaps your address if you live in China.
I have been learning Chinese since 2007 and have very rarely needed to write anything by hand, even though I have spent almost five years in immersion environments. This experience is not unique; it is clearly the norm. You simply do not need to write by hand very often.
And when you do, you can always look up characters on your phone if you do not know how to write them. Real life is not a school exam; using a dictionary is not cheating.
“Handwriting is necessary to progress through formal education.”
This is unfortunately true, although it does depend somewhat on where you are studying. The fact remains, however, that in most Chinese language courses, you are often required to write by hand. You might also be expected to do so in entrance exams or some proficiency tests.
I say that this is “unfortunately” true because it presents an argument in favour of handwriting that is not really an argument. Learning something simply to advance to the next level in a formal system is a strange notion, especially when that particular skill is not needed outside that system.
Getting good grades and getting good at Chinese are both important, but they are not the same thing.
“Handwriting is sometimes necessary in professional contexts.”
I have talked about handwriting with dozens of students who live and work in China. While it is true that most of them say that reading and typing are enough, there are rare exceptions. In some situations, you might be required to write by hand, or it might be highly inconvenient not to be able to.
Still, it seems odd to spend hundreds or even thousands of extra hours on handwriting just in case you one day get a job where this is required. It would seem to make much more sense to take it easy with handwriting until you are closer to that job, and only then make a serious effort to learn it.
One of my main reasons for maintaining my ability to write by hand is that it’s almost necessary to know when teaching the language. Not being able to write things by hand on a whiteboard is inconvenient, and students might be wondering if you actually know what you’re doing if you fish out your dictionary for every other character.
“If you can’t write by hand, you can’t talk about Chinese characters well.”
This might seem like a strange argument at first, but the fact is that Chinese people do talk about writing characters sometimes. For example, when being introduced to someone, or when introducing yourself with your name, it is not uncommon to have to describe the characters you use.
Still, native speakers do not describe how to write their names using individual strokes. If they did, then it really would be essential to know at least the stroke order for characters.
Instead, they indicate which character they mean by putting it in context (it’s the character with this pronunciation in this word), or they break compounds into components and describe each part, usually by referring to other words in which those components appear. You can do this perfectly well without having practised writing the characters by hand. Detailed knowledge of character is needed, but there are many ways of obtaining that knowledge.
“Writing yourself makes it easier to read other people’s handwriting.”
While you can choose to strategically skip or cut down on handwriting, and this probably will not have many practical downsides in real life, this does not mean that you can prevent other people from communicating through handwriting. In other words, you still need to be able to read other people’s handwriting.
This can range from being easy (your teacher’s writing on the board) to impossible (your doctor’s notes), but most of the time, it is difficult yet manageable with practice (such as the average native speaker’s handwriting).
36 samples of Chinese handwriting from students and native speakers
Handwriting is difficult to read because people who write frequently join strokes. I do not mean that they start writing cursive script (although some do), I just mean that they write standard characters while lifting the pencil fewer times.
For example, 口 (kǒu), “mouth”, is written with three strokes, but in fluent handwriting, it is often written with one or two strokes. The result looks something like this, resembling the number 12 (the example is from the article linked above):
The characters written here are 窗口那儿. Note how 口 is written in two strokes, looking almost like the number 12.
If you know nothing about handwriting and stroke order, this type of abbreviation will be baffling. Why not write a circle or something? Yet this type of shorthand is very common. If you write a lot yourself, you will start doing some of these automatically. This does make reading other people’s handwriting easier.
Still, if that is your goal, learning basic principles of stroke order and the most common characters should be enough. You could instead use the time you save to practise reading handwritten Chinese, for example by using specific fonts, such as the ones I recommend in the linked article.
“Knowing stroke order is necessary to look up characters effectively.”
This used to be a strong argument in favour of learning to write by hand properly. I remember what it was like to get my hands on my first digital dictionary with handwriting input. It was a game-changer. I no longer needed to spend minutes looking up a single unknown character, trying to figure out what the radical might be, counting strokes and flipping through a dictionary. If you started learning Chinese after the digital revolution, it is hard to describe how important digital dictionary look-ups were, but David Moser does an excellent job of explaining it in this guest article The new paperless revolution in Chinese reading.
What’s this got to do with learning to write by hand today, almost twenty years after I bought that dictionary, you might wonder? Well, the issue with handwriting input is that it is not just a visual comparison between the final character you write and all the characters stored in the device’s or program’s memory.
Instead, handwriting look-up is done stroke by stroke, so if your stroke order is correct, you can mangle the input a lot and still find the character you’re looking for. Indeed, it is possible to write so badly that a human would find it impossible to read, but as long as the strokes are roughly in the right sequence, the computer will still identify the correct character. Take a look at the left image below. I wrote 龍, lóng, “dragon” (simplified: 龙) in Pleco. This is not legible for a human, but it is for the computer.
However, if your stroke order is off, the look-up will fail. Or at least it used to be like that. Now take a look at the image to the right, which is written with terrible stroke order (I wrote strokes in an arbitrary order and tried to join or break up strokes to deliberately trick the recognition). No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t do it; Pleco is still able to find the right character.
So, it is no longer true that you need correct stroke order, or indeed even correct stroke count, to look up characters using your phone. In addition to that, optical character reading (OCR) has become so good that most phones have functions where you can just point at something and get it transcribed into text and translated if you wish. Both Pleco and Hanping have OCR features where you simply take a photo of some text and can then use a normal pop-up dictionary on that text.
For more about different ways to look up Chinese characters as a student, please refer to How to look up Chinese characters you don’t know.
Conclusion: Practical and functional arguments
As long as you set your own goals for learning, there is little practical reason to handwrite everything you can type. However, as soon as other people, including institutions, are involved, it might be the case that you do need to write by hand.
How much this matters to you depends greatly on your learning context and your reasons for studying Chinese.
Section 2: Arguments grounded in learning efficiency and memory
“Writing by hand helps me remember characters longer and in more detail.”
There is no reason to believe this is wrong. For many students, writing by hand is linked with more attention to detail, deeper processing and more time spent on each character compared to typing.
This would seem to be a good argument for handwriting, but I think it conflates two things that should be kept separate.
Handwriting does not automatically lead to deep processing. It is possible to copy characters by hand without thinking much, which involves no deep processing. Conversely, it is also possible to study the structure and details of characters without writing them by hand.
Don’t forget that you save a lot of time by typing more than you write by hand, and for this comparison to make sense, you should consider investing that time into studying characters. While I don’t think this is feasible to investigate empirically, I’d bet that directly studying characters (as opposed to just writing the strokes) is more efficient.
For more about how the Chinese writing system works, check my series of articles on the topic, starting here: The building blocks of Chinese, part 1: Chinese characters and words in a nutshell.
The building blocks of Chinese, part 1: Chinese characters and words in a nutshell
“The tactility of handwriting helps me remember characters.”
Writing and typing feel different, and there is plenty of evidence to suggest that they are not the same thing. Many students report that the muscle memory involved in writing characters helps them recall them later.
When I wrote a lot by hand in graduate school in Taiwan, there were characters that seemed easier to write if I did not think about them; they just flowed out through my hand onto the paper.
While I don’t think this is about learning styles (for which empirical evidence is scant) or some learners being “tactile”, using various senses and methods to review is generally a good idea and something everybody benefits from.
The problem here is one of opportunity cost. It takes a ridiculous amount of handwriting practice to reach a point where you can write characters without consciously thinking about their structure. You could simply use that time to learn something else instead, including learning more characters, or learning more about the characters you already know, if that is your goal.
“Writing by hand makes it easier to distinguish similar characters when reading.”
Some people say that handwriting helps with reading because when you write, you need to pay attention to details. Sometimes, these details do matter, and that can be useful for reading as well.
For example, the characters 已 (yǐ), 己 (jǐ) and 巳 (sì) are identical except for the starting point of the third stroke.
Examples like these are misleading, however. When reading, you don’t look at each individual stroke in every character; that would be painfully slow, and it is not how reading works. If you write 自已 (zì yǐ) in a message, nobody would blink. Most people would not even notice.
The reason, of course, is that 自己 (zìjǐ) is a high-frequency word, whereas 自已 (zì yǐ) and 自巳 (zì sì) are not. Similarly, if you see __经 (__jīng), you can tell that the first character is 已 (yǐ) without looking very closely; something vaguely similar will do.
And remember, this case has been chosen specifically because the characters are similar. In most cases, characters are much more different than that. If you start the third stroke of 中 (zhōng) a bit early, this will have zero effect on readability.
In fact, you can alter characters even more than that without people noticing and without significantly affecting reading comprehension. Here is an excellent article by The Hexacoto about the persistence of comprehension that I strongly suggest you read if you believe that individual strokes matter.
Conclusion: Learning efficiency and memory
The arguments in this category are not wrong in themselves; handwriting can lead to deeper processing, at least if practised correctly. The real issue is opportunity cost.
If we try to balance our ability to speak and write, meaning we aim to handwrite everything we can say, as is often expected in formal educational settings, most students will end up spending the majority of their time learning characters.
As I have argued more thoroughly elsewhere, this is not acceptable. The opportunity cost is simply too high. Progress slows to a snail’s pace compared with what it could be.
This was the main point in the article Chinese character learning for all students mentioned earlier.
Section 3: Cultural and personal arguments
“Chinese characters are a core part of Chinese culture.”
No doubt about it. This argument comes up often, but the obvious flaw is that although Chinese characters are undeniably an integral part of Chinese culture, it is perfectly possible to learn about, understand and appreciate this without writing them by hand. This applies to calligraphy too, which is literally handwriting turned into an art form.
This argument is about skipping the written language entirely, not merely reducing the focus on handwriting characters.
“You can’t say that you’ve mastered Chinese if you can’t write by hand.”
I’ve heard this said many times, mostly by native speakers when they realise that there are foreigners who learn Chinese and decide to skip writing by hand. Even if it is mostly an unreflected opinion, that does not mean it is invalid.
Depending on what you mean by “mastered” (or whichever similar word is being used), it could be argued that you are missing a key component if you cannot write by hand. Similarly, it is not unreasonable to claim that you have not fully learnt the language if you cannot type, read aloud or pronounce things intelligibly.
The question here is more about who should determine why you are learning Mandarin. Unless this person has a direct influence on your life, it is unlikely that a random native speaker’s opinion should matter to you. Unless, of course, they happen to be the ones admitting you to a programme or hiring you for a position, but we have covered that elsewhere in this article.
“If you don’t learn to write characters, you don’t know what it’s like.”
Native speakers spend an enormous amount of time learning Chinese characters in school, far more than we spend learning to write our native languages. This is not surprising, considering that the task is objectively more difficult, but it is an important cultural point.
Native speakers know what it is like, and people who learnt Chinese before the age of the smartphone or in a programme where handwriting was required at least have an idea of what it is like.
I think this is a valid argument, but if you are truly aiming for cultural understanding, it might be better to improve your listening and reading to the point where you can read first-hand accounts of what going to school is like in China or speak directly with native speakers about their experience.
“People don’t study Chinese properly these days; we used to write by hand at school”
This seems to be more a lamentation of the fact that digital technology has changed how we use language, rather than a serious argument in favour of handwriting. Appealing to tradition in itself, without bringing up other positive effects of handwriting, doesn’t add anything to the debate.
Even if I started learning Chinese when I was 23, I also learnt to write characters by hand. While this experience can be culturally valuable in itself (see previous argument), the fact that it used to be done like that doesn’t mean that we should do so now. We used to think that bloodletting helped treat illness, but we don’t do that anymore.
The problem here is, of course, that there is a certain amount of judgment involved; as if doing something “properly” means that anyone who does it differently must be lazy, decadent or foolish. We learn Chinese for different reasons, and again, each to their own.
“Being able to write characters by hand is a great way to impress native speakers.”
Or: “Not being able to write can be very embarrassing.”
While true, this might seem like an odd argument, or at least a very superficial one, but I do not think it should be dismissed. Impressing people can be important, especially if there are benefits to be gained from someone thinking your Chinese is impressive.
The opposite can also happen, namely that people lose respect for you because you cannot write by hand. “Sure, your spoken Mandarin is great, but you cannot write, so what does it matter?” Leaving people unimpressed can have a negative effect as well.
This is a little bit like the difference between having good and really good pronunciation. It should not matter, but it does.
Conclusion: Cultural and personal arguments
Again, the arguments in this category will hit differently depending on who you are. Most people might not care about impressing native speakers or feel embarrassed when they don’t know something someone else thinks they ought to know.
The most solid argument here is probably the one about experiencing what it’s like to learn characters, but you can achieve that by learning to handwrite a subset of characters, not all of them.
Section 4: Handwriting as a cognitive tool and emotional experience
“Writing characters is good mental exercise, gymnastics for your brain”
I’m not an expert on cognition and how various activities affect mental ability, but if there’s anything I’ve learnt by reading in this area, it is that gains are likely to be isolated to the type of activity you engage in.
Memory seems to be an exception, so it probably is a good idea to constantly challenge yourself to remember things, but you can do that without writing characters by hand. You are in fact already doing this every day if you’re learning Chinese in the first place.
While writing characters by hand is more useful than playing “brain games” on your phone, I think actively developing your vocabulary and general language ability is more useful, and probably also better for your brain (whatever that means).
“I like writing characters. It feels good or looks cool.”
Many people report liking handwriting because it allows them to get more intimate with Chinese characters. Writing a character you know well, even with a normal pencil, feels quite nice. If you can do it with a brush, even better.
Chinese characters are also aesthetically pleasing, and many students say they started learning Chinese at least partly because of the beautiful characters. I was such a student, too! Chinese characters look awesome, so being able to write them is a no-brainer.
It’s hard to argue against this. If you like apples, eat apples. If you like action movies, go to the cinema and watch one. If you like writing characters, write characters!
“Writing characters is meditative and relaxing.”
This argument is similar to the one above. I’m not going to tell you it’s bad to meditate and relax. If you think that handwriting feels good, that’s great! To each their own.
Conclusion: Cognitive and emotional arguments
It’s hard to deny very subjective or preference-based arguments in favour of learning to write Chinese characters by hand, just don’t mix them up with questions of efficiency. And don’t force your preferences on others! Some people find handwriting tedious and frustrating, too.
16 reasons to learn to write Chinese characters by hand
There are many arguments in favour of learning to write Chinese characters by hand. Many arguments brought up in this article are good in the sense that they apply to most learners and aren’t based on misconceptions.
However, the reason I, and many other educators, recommend limiting handwriting in general is not because we think it’s bad, but because of the opportunity cost. Writing by hand certainly has benefits, but the amount of time you need to invest to reap those benefits is insane compared to more direct methods.
Other arguments are highly subjective. If you like writing Chinese characters or think that they look cool, it seems unnecessary to argue against that. I also like writing characters and think they are cool, but I also know that many people don’t. Use these arguments to explain why you write by hand, but don’t use them to force others to do so if you’re a teacher.
Then there are arguments that are situational; they are true, but not for a majority of learners. Here again, it’s important not to impose your preferences on other students if you’re a teacher. We all learn for different reasons. It’s highly unlikely that your students are learning Chinese for the same reason that you did (especially true if you’re a native speaker), so it follows that using the same methods might be inappropriate.
Handwriting in Chinese is not a simple either-or question
Finally, remember that whether or not you should learn handwriting is not a binary decision. While some students might choose to never write anything by hand, most students are served well by learning a limited set of core characters. This provides most of the benefits without consuming valuable time from other types of studying and learning.
This debate has never been between writing everything by hand and writing nothing by hand. Instead, I’m suggesting a sensible approach where students learn to write the most important characters by hand to reap most of the benefits of handwriting, but without investing so much time that it detracts from other areas of the language.
The real question is how many characters students ought to learn to write by hand, which characters to learn and when to learn them. These questions are unlikely to have general answers, though, as each student’s learning situation and goals will vary.
References and further reading
Chu, C., Coss, M. D., & Zhang, P. N. (Eds.). (2024). Transforming Hanzi Pedagogy in the Digital Age: Theory, Research, and Practice: 电写时代的汉字教学: 理论与实践. Routledge.
Coss, M. D. (2024). The E-writing Approach to L2 Chinese Pedagogy: Educational Imperative and Empirical Evidence. In Teaching Chinese Characters in the Digital Age: Insights on Current Trends and Future Directions (pp. 81-104). Cham: Springer Nature Switzerland.
Linge, O. (2024). Chinese Character Learning for All Students. In Transforming Hanzi Pedagogy in the Digital Age: Theory, Research, and Practice (pp. 247-249). Routledge. Also available on Hacking Chinese here.
周质平（编）. (2025). “电写时代的汉字教学: 变与不变”大家谈. 语言教学与研究, 2025(3). Olle’s comment: This is a good overview in Chinese. I think I have covered most of the arguments here already, and many sections in the article combine several arguments.
Thanks to Matt Coss, both for his work in promoting e-writing and for recommending the articles listed above.
