7 ways to learn to write Chinese characters
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).
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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.
16 reasons to learn to write Chinese characters by hand
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.
How to improve your Chinese handwriting
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!
The building blocks of Chinese, part 3: Compound characters
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.
The real challenge with learning Chinese characters
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.
Skritter review: Boosting your Chinese character learning
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.
Chinese character learning for all students
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
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