Handwriting practice is the proven and most widely used approach to learn and memorize Chinese characters and words. As an alternaive to writing on paper, this tool allows you to practice your Chinese handwriting on your personal mobile devices using your finger or on your desktop using a mouse. Powered by a sophisticated proprietary handwriting recognition technology, the system can adaptively provide instant feeback to help you write Chinese characters in the proper form and learn the order in which characters’ various component parts should be written. Read the instructions at the end of this page before you start to practice writing online.
Writing characters in the correct stroke order can greatly facilitate learning and memorization. Correct stroke order is also vital to produce visually appealing characters. There are minor stroke order discrepancies between simplified and traditional Chinese characters. In this system, the stroke orders for simplified Chinese characters are strictly based on 《现代汉语通用字笔顺规范》 (Modern Chinese Commonly Used Character Stroke Order Standard) published by 国家语委和中华人民共和国新闻出版署(China National Language And Character Working Committee and General Administration of Press and Publication of the Peoples' Republic of China) in 1997. For traditional Chinese characters, which is used in Taiwan and Hong Kong, Arch Chinese follows the standard issued by Taiwan Ministry of Education.
Traditionally, Chinese is written in vertical columns from top to bottom; the text runs from the right toward the left of the page. Modern Chinese uses the familiar western layout of horizontal rows from left to right, read from the top of the page to the bottom. To facilitate the horizontal writing, the stroke order of some characters were changed. That is one of the reasons there are minor differences between the two standards. However, both standards were devised to help speed, fluidity, and accuracy in composition. The basic rules of stroke order remain the same.
Similar to Chinese Pinyin Table, the Chinese Radical Table lists all 214 radicals for the traditional Chinese characters. The list of Chinese radicals is a rough equivalent of a Chinese alphabet. They are used to index the characters for Chinese dictionaries. They are also building blocks of the Chinese characters and often reflecting some common semantic or phonetic characteristic. Knowing common radicals can greatly help you learn new Chinese characters.
To look up a character, you can click the radical. The system will navigate to the dictionary page and display all the characters with the same radical. If you know the Pinyin, you can use Chinese Pinyin Table to look up characters.
If you are learning simplified Chinese characters, switch to Chinese Radical Table - Simplified .
The character structure information is very useful for Chinese language learners to recognize the character composition. The following table lists the common character structures of modern Chinese characters.
Uses Cantonese romanisation to input Chinese characters. However, Cantonese romanisation has not been standardized and there are several romanisation systems. This input method uses The Linguistic Society of Hong Kong's system. Most characters are denoted by initial and final, and many characters have several romanisations for the sake of convenience. Tone mark is not needed for this input method.