The puzzle everyone prints, playable
Chinese Word Search
电脑? 老师? 中国? Drag across the grid to find them. The list gives you the pinyin and the meaning — remembering which characters spell the word is the whole exercise. HSK 1–6, 8 words a grid, and a clock.
- Read the clue, not the answer. The word list shows the pinyin and the English meaning. Switch it to Show characters on the start screen if you would rather play the ordinary way.
- Drag across the word — first character to last. On a phone you can also tap both ends, and from a keyboard every cell is a button: Enter on one end, Enter on the other.
- Beat the clock. Each grid gives you time in proportion to the words in it, and every round gives you a little less per word. Clear a grid and the seconds you had left become points.
- Keep the run going. Every 3 finds in a row without a wrong selection raises the multiplier, up to ×5. A wrong selection costs no time, only the multiplier.
- Stuck? Take a hint — it flashes the first character of a word you have not found, for 40 points off. Rounds get bigger as you go: 10×10 with 8, 12×12 with 10, 12×12 with 10, 14×14 with 12, 16×16 with 14, and diagonals and backwards words arrive at round 3.
A round-one board with its answers marked — 8 words in a 10×10 grid, straight lines only. Notice what the padding is made of: the characters of the words themselves. Filling the rest of the board with unrelated characters would give the puzzle away, because the answers would be the only familiar-looking thing on it.
- diànnǎo — computer (电脑)
- lǎoshī — teacher (老师)
- Zhōngguó — China (中国)
- péngyou — friend (朋友)
- shíjiān — time (时间)
- xuésheng — student (学生)
- xǐhuan — to like (喜欢)
- mǐfàn — cooked rice (米饭)
In the game the characters in brackets are hidden until you find the word. That is the difference between this and a printed word search: on paper you match a shape you can already see, here you have to recall it first.
A word search in English is a spelling exercise: you know the word, you scan for its letters. In Chinese it is a different task, because the thing you are scanning for is the part most learners are weakest at. You can hold diànnǎo, computer in your head perfectly and still not be able to pick 电脑 out of a grid — that gap between knowing a word by sound and knowing it by sight is the one that keeps people from reading.
So the clue here is deliberately the half you already have. The pinyin and the meaning are given; the characters are what you have to produce. Scanning a grid forces the recall over and over in a few seconds, which is why it works as a warm-up before reading practice rather than as the reading practice itself.
If that is too much at once, switch the clues to Show characters and it becomes the ordinary puzzle — still useful, because finding 喜欢 among a field of 喜 and 欢 is real character discrimination. Then switch back when you are ready.
There is no print button here on purpose. Teacher Zone's word search generator already does printing properly: a choice of grid size and difficulty, a hanzi or pinyin-letters puzzle, your own pasted word list if you have one, an answer key, and the copyright and licence footer every sheet handed round a classroom needs.
Both surfaces call the same grid builder, so the puzzle on paper and the puzzle on screen are made the same way — a change to one is a change to both, which is the point of it living in one place.
| Round | Grid | Words | Directions |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 10×10 | 8 | → ↓ |
| 2 | 12×12 | 10 | → ↓ |
| 3 | 12×12 | 10 | + diagonal, backwards |
| 4 | 14×14 | 12 | + diagonal, backwards |
| 5+ | 16×16 | 14 | + diagonal, backwards |