Free Chinese PDF Downloads

Four printable packs, bundled from the material already on this site: an HSK 1–3 vocabulary workbook, 田字格 writing sheets, a 100-radical wall poster and a travel phrasebook. No sign-up, no email address, no download cap — click the file and it is yours.

Nothing gated

HSK 1–3 Starter Workbook

601 words
all of HSK 1, 2 and 3

The first three official word lists in one file — the whole of what an HSK 3 candidate is expected to know — with a tick column for the words you already have, a self-test section with the English hidden, and 田字格 writing rows for every character HSK 1 uses.

  • All three word lists: number, simplified, traditional, tone-marked pinyin, English
  • A tick column, so "learn HSK 3" becomes a number that goes down
  • A self-test section: the same words with the meanings blanked out
  • 田字格 writing rows for every character in HSK 1, traced then blank

田字格 Character Practice Pack

617 characters
every character HSK 1–3 uses

The writing paper Chinese children learn on: a square split into four quadrants so the parts of a character land where they should. Three rulings blank for anything you want to practise, then a traced row for all 617 characters of HSK 1 to 3 — the character in grey to write over, then empty squares to do it alone.

  • Blank 田字格 sheets in three sizes: 20 mm for beginners, 15 mm and 12 mm as your hand settles
  • A ruled sheet with a line above each row for the pinyin
  • A traced row for every character used in HSK 1, 2 and 3, in level order
  • Each traced row carries the reading and the meaning, so you know what you are writing

The 100 Chinese Radicals Poster

100 radicals
one wall sheet plus a reference table

The hundred radicals a dictionary files characters under, on a single A3 sheet in stroke-count order, each with its pinyin, its meaning and the squeezed form it takes inside a character — so you can recognise 人 as the 亻 in 你. A reference table follows with example characters for every one of them.

  • One A3 poster: 100 radicals in stroke-count order, the order a dictionary uses
  • The combining form beside each radical, which is the half beginners never get shown
  • A reference table with example characters for every radical
  • The ones a beginner meets first are marked, so the sheet has a starting point

Chinese Travel Phrasebook

490 lines
across 17 situations

Every phrase from the travel phrasebook in one file, grouped by situation from the immigration desk to a hospital — and, unusually, what the other person is likely to say, because not understanding the reply is what actually goes wrong. Characters, pinyin and English side by side, so it works whether you read Chinese or point at it.

  • Every situation on the site, in trip order: arriving, moving, sleeping, eating, paying, shopping, emergencies, and the business set
  • What they say to you, before what you say to them — the half most phrasebooks leave out
  • Characters, tone-marked pinyin and English in three columns, printable in black and white
  • A survival note per situation: the thing that is not language and still catches people out

Also free: the six HSK word lists

The packs above bundle several things at once. If what you want is one level's vocabulary as a plain reference table — HSK 1 through HSK 6, each as its own file — those are separate downloads and they are equally free. Compare the six HSK vocabulary PDFs, or go straight to a level from the HSK hub. Beyond HSK 3 they are the only printable word list here, since the workbook stops where the writing practice stops being worth the paper.

Printing these without wasting paper

Every pack is laid out for A4 and prints on US Letter without anything falling off the edge, so you can ignore the paper-size box. The one file that wants a different sheet is the radicals poster: its first page is drawn at A3 so it stays readable on a wall, and printing it at A4 simply scales it down. Set your printer to Fit to page and it will do the right thing either way.

Print the part you need, not the file. These are bundles, and the whole point of a bundle is that most people want a slice of it: the HSK 2 list on its own, one situation from the phrasebook, a handful of writing sheets. Every pack opens with a contents list and each section starts on a fresh page, so a page range in the print dialog gets you exactly one section.

Black and white is fine. The writing grids are printed in a light red because that is the colour 田字格 paper traditionally uses, but they are drawn as thin lines rather than fills, so a mono printer renders them as pale grey guides — which is what you want under a pencil anyway.

Why there is no email box on this page

Free printables are usually the front end of a mailing list. You get the PDF, they get your address, and the file is worth exactly as much to them as the address is. That trade is not on offer here, and it is not an introductory offer either: there are no accounts anywhere on this site, nothing you do here is stored on our servers, and there is no version of these files with more in them.

The reason is more selfish than it sounds. A file behind a form cannot be linked to by a teacher, cited by an AI search engine, or ranked by Google on the thing it gates — so a gate costs more visitors than the addresses are worth. Ungated files earn links; links are what pay for this site. If you want to help, link to a pack rather than re-hosting the file, so readers get the corrected version.

What you may do with these files

Print them, photocopy them, hand them round a classroom and use them in a paid class. Each file carries its own terms on the first page, because a PDF gets saved, re-hosted and printed by people who never saw this page — and by then the notice inside it is the only thing that says where it came from.

The HSK 1–3 workbook carries English definitions from our own dictionary, except the ones marked , which are adapted from CC-CEDICT under CC BY-SA 4.0. That licence lets you share and adapt the marked definitions, commercially included, provided the credit travels with the copy and anything built from them keeps the same terms, so the one thing worth not doing is cropping the first page off. The character practice pack, the radicals poster and the travel phrasebook are our own material and carry no such licence: copy them freely for teaching, but please do not resell them or republish them as your own.

The typesetting is ours; the vocabulary is not, and we do not claim it. Every dataset, font and library this site uses is named with its licence on the licences page.

Free Chinese PDFs — questions

Yes, all of them, with nothing asked in return. There is no sign-up, no email address, no download cap and no watermark. They are ordinary URLs under /downloads, so you can bookmark one, link it from a class page or cite it without coming back through this site at all. That is a deliberate decision rather than an introductory offer: a file behind an email box cannot be linked to, cited by an AI search engine, or found by the search that would have sent someone to it.

No. There are no accounts anywhere on this site — not for the downloads, not for the flashcards, not for the games — and nothing you do here is stored on our servers. Your study progress lives in your own browser and leaves with it.

If you are learning vocabulary, the HSK 1–3 workbook: it is the whole of what an HSK 3 candidate is expected to know, with somewhere to mark what you already have. If you are learning to write, the character practice pack. The radicals poster is the one to put on a wall, and the travel phrasebook is the one to print the week before a trip.

Yes, including in a paid class. The HSK 1–3 workbook carries English definitions from our own dictionary, except those marked with a dagger, which are adapted from CC-CEDICT under CC BY-SA 4.0 — a licence that permits commercial use and photocopying of those definitions provided the credit travels with the copy — that credit is printed inside the file, which is why it should not be cropped off. The character practice pack, the radicals poster and the phrasebook are our own material: print them, copy them and hand them round freely, but please do not resell them or republish them as your own.

田字格 means "field-character grid", after the character 田, which looks exactly like the box. The cross splits each square into four quadrants so the parts of a character land in the right place relative to one another — which is most of what makes handwriting look right or wrong. It is the paper Chinese children learn on, and it is far more useful than lined paper for the first year or two.

Because every variant would be another file competing with the canonical one in search results, and readers would have to guess which was current. The workbook prints simplified and traditional in adjacent columns instead, so covering one with a ruler gives you either view on paper. Single HSK levels do exist as their own files — those are the six HSK vocabulary PDFs, which is a different page.

They are generated from the same word lists, radical data and phrasebook the rest of the site runs on, so they are rebuilt whenever that data changes. Nothing in a pack is written for the PDF; if a word looks wrong in a file it is wrong on the page too, and both get fixed together. Each file names the page it came from on its first page.

Yes, though two of them are built for paper. The workbook and the phrasebook read perfectly well on a screen and the phrasebook is arguably better on one, since you can search it. The character practice pack and the poster assume a printer — a writing grid you cannot write on is not much use, unless your tablet takes a stylus, in which case it works rather well.