Print your own Chinese handwriting practice sheets. Pick HSK characters or type your own words, choose 田字格 or 米字格 boxes, and get the correct stroke order, grey characters to trace, pinyin and meaning. Free, no sign-up, made in your browser.
- Free, no sign-up
- Regular-script shapes, not a computer font
- HSK 1 to 9 and the official handwriting list
- Made in your browser, no account
Characters
Type your own, pick from the HSK lists or use your saved list.
Pinyin and meaning fill in by themselves. Tap a word below to change them or to save it to My list.
Words: each new character first, then a row for the whole word.
Layout
Start from a preset, then adjust.
More: paper, colours, title
Theory pages
Optional pages printed at the front. One page each.
How to write Chinese characters
Every character is built from a few strokes, written in a fixed order, from parts that repeat. Learn these once and each new character gets easier. Tap a character to watch it being written.
How to practise 练字
Five steps for every new character. Short sessions spread over days beat filling a page in one go.
Your plan for one sheet
Which grid?
The strokes 笔画
Every stroke is one of eight basic movements or a joined chain of them. A compound stroke is written in one go, without lifting the pen.
The 8 basic strokes
Compound strokes: written in one movement
Stroke order 笔顺
Stroke order makes characters come out balanced, keeps fast handwriting readable and helps you remember the shape: learners who keep to the rules also write better from memory. These rules follow the mainland standard (通用规范汉字笔顺规范); Taiwan, Hong Kong and Japan differ for some characters.
Special cases
Radicals and components 部首
Most characters combine a part that hints at the meaning (often the radical) with a part that hints at the sound. Learn the parts once and every new character is a combination of things you already know.
How parts fit into the square
Meaning + sound: one family
Radicals worth knowing first
Modern dictionaries sort characters under 201 radicals (汉字部首表 GF 0011-2009); older ones use the 214 Kangxi radicals.
Common mistakes 常见错误
Slips that teachers often correct in beginners’ handwriting. Red cross: how it often looks. Green tick: how it should look.
Pen and brush 硬笔和毛笔
Chinese characters were shaped by the brush. Knowing how a brush moves explains the shapes you copy with a pen: pointed ends, flat ends, sharp hooks.
Ready to write? Make a sheet with any characters, in the right stroke order.
Make a practice sheetQuestions and answers
- Are the sheets free?
- Yes. No sign-up, no watermark and no limit. The PDF is made in your browser: your list, your pinyin and meaning changes and your settings stay on your device. Only the shapes of the characters you pick are downloaded, from public data files.
- Which grid should I choose?
- 田字格 (a cross through the middle) is the classic grid for pencil and pen. 米字格 adds two diagonals and helps with the angles of brush strokes. 九宫格 has nine squares for placing the parts of a character. Switch to plain boxes once you can centre a character without help.
- What box size should I print?
- 16 or 20 mm for beginners and children, 12 mm to fit many characters on a page, 24 mm for a brush or a thick pen. Print at Actual size (100%), not “Fit to page”: a 16 mm box must measure 16 mm on paper.
- Is the stroke order correct?
- It follows the mainland Chinese standard (通用规范汉字笔顺规范), as drawn in the Make Me a Hanzi data. Taiwan, Hong Kong and Japan write some characters in a different order. The stroke-by-stroke row on each sheet shows every stroke in red, where it starts.
- Which HSK list should I use?
- Most HSK exams in 2026 still use the HSK 2.0 lists, until the new tests start. HSK 3.0 has nine levels: the 2021 standard and a revised syllabus set for July 2026. The handwriting list holds the 1,200 characters HSK 3.0 expects you to write by hand.
- Can I practise traditional characters?
- Yes: type them in. The data covers about 9,500 characters, simplified and traditional; the HSK lists are in simplified characters. A very rare character without stroke data prints from your own font, without stroke order.
- Does it work on a phone?
- Yes. Pick your characters, check the preview, tap Download PDF, then print the file from your downloads.
Sources
Research behind the advice on this page:
- Guan, C. Q., Liu, Y., Chan, D. H. L., Ye, F. and Perfetti, C. A. (2011). Writing strengthens orthography and alphabetic-coding strengthens phonology in learning to read Chinese. Journal of Educational Psychology 103(3), 509 to 522. doi:10.1037/a0023730
- Naka, M. (1998). Repeated writing facilitates children’s memory for pseudocharacters and foreign letters. Memory and Cognition 26(4), 804 to 809.
- Xu, Y., Chang, L.-Y. and Perfetti, C. A. (2014). The effect of radical-based grouping in character learning in Chinese as a foreign language. The Modern Language Journal 98(3), 773 to 793.
- Shen, H. H. and Ke, C. (2007). Radical awareness and word acquisition among nonnative learners of Chinese. The Modern Language Journal 91(1), 97 to 111.
- Roediger, H. L. and Karpicke, J. D. (2006). Test-enhanced learning. Psychological Science 17(3), 249 to 255. Cepeda, N. J. et al. (2006). Distributed practice in verbal recall tasks. Psychological Bulletin 132(3), 354 to 380.
- 陈晨 and 冯丽萍 (2016). 意大利汉语初学者汉字基本笔顺书写规律及其相关因素研究 (stroke order of Italian beginners). 云南师范大学学报 (对外汉语教学与研究版) 14(4).
- Standards: 通用规范汉字笔顺规范 (stroke order, 2020); 汉字部首表 GF 0011-2009 (201 radicals); 国际中文教育中文水平等级标准 GF 0025-2021 (HSK 3.0, with the handwriting list). Posture rule 三个一: Chinese Ministry of Education notice of 30 September 2024.
Data and software, each under its own licence:
- Character shapes and stroke order: Make Me a Hanzi by Shaunak Kishore, derived from fonts by Arphic Technology, used through hanzi-writer-data 2.0.1, under the Arphic Public License.
- Pinyin, radicals and parts of single characters: the Make Me a Hanzi dictionary (from Unihan and CJKlib), under the GNU LGPL 3.0 or later.
- HSK word lists: complete-hsk-vocabulary by Yanis Zafirópulos (MIT licence), with word meanings from CC-CEDICT (MDBG), shortened for the sheets, under CC BY-SA 4.0.
- HSK 3.0 character list and handwriting list: ivankra/hsk30 (MIT licence), from the GF 0025-2021 standard.
- Stroke animations: Hanzi Writer by David Chanin (MIT licence). PDF: pdf-lib by Andrew Dillon and fontkit by Devon Govett (MIT licence). Text font: Noto Sans (SIL Open Font License 1.1).
- All files are loaded at fixed versions from jsDelivr and cdnjs.
Practice material made by DerSuperF for travelfrugally.com. Not linked to Chinese Testing International or the official HSK; the HSK lists are shown as published by the projects above. Stroke order and meanings come from open data and can contain mistakes: check with your teacher when in doubt.
More Chinese practice
- Learn Chinese: tones, your first 300 words, characters and short stories, free.
- Chinese characters: watch the stroke order, trace each character, then recall it on review days.
- Start from zero: the four tones and pinyin before your first characters.