Does handwriting still have a place in modern Chinese learning? Let’s explore 8 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 episode (#256).
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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.”
- 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
We have a lot to discuss, so in this first part, we will explore sections 1-2, and in a follow-up article, I will then cover sections 3-4:
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 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.”
If you think I’ve missed an important argument, please leave a comment so I can cover it in the follow-up article!
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.
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.
Wrapping up… for now!
Those are all the arguments I’ve found relating to practical usage, functionality, learning efficiency and memory. Did I miss anything? As mentioned earlier, I will expand this article later, covering sections 3 and 4, but there will also be room for expanding sections 1 and 2. If you have an argument I haven’t covered, please leave a comment!
To make it easier to see what I already plan to cover in the expanded version, here’s the overview again:
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 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.”
