The 346 characters behind the HSK 1 and 2 words. Watch the strokes, trace them as often as you like, then recall each character on spaced reviews.
How the practice works
- Meet. A new character is drawn stroke by stroke, with its sound, its meaning, the parts it is built from and a word it is used in.
- Trace. You trace it over a grey outline, once or as often as you like (or 3 or 5 times in a row, set in Settings). A wrong stroke shows you the right one, and after two misses the stroke is drawn for you, so you never get stuck. You can also hide the outline and write it from memory.
- Recall. On review days you see the character alone, remember its sound and meaning, then check and say how it went.
- Write. For the most common characters you also write them from memory, one day after meeting them.
- Look again. On every card, Watch replays the strokes and Step by step adds one stroke per tap. ‹ Back returns to the card before, so you can copy a character onto paper at your own pace.
- Practise now. Type any number, for new characters or for ones you have met to write from memory, for example one per row of your practice sheet.
- Find. Look up a character by its pinyin, with or without tones (do finds dōu and duō), by its English meaning, or draw it with your phone’s Chinese handwriting keyboard.
- Quiet. The speaker button at the top of the practice turns all sound off, for libraries and trains. Slip a lot and you may find a surprise or two.
Characters come in a fixed order: the most useful ones first, and simple parts before the characters built from them. Use Find to look a character up by sound, meaning or handwriting, and All 346 to browse them. More on the method: About Learn Chinese.