Handwriting, Character Practice and Paper

Q: Do I have to buy anything for writing practice?

No. This site covers the same ground for free — Printable 田字格 sheets, free, Animated stroke order for any character, Draw a character to look it up — free, in your browser — and those pages need no account and cost nothing. The items on this page are for the things a website cannot be.

Q: Are these ranked by what they pay you?

No, and they structurally cannot be: the data record behind a recommendation on this site has no field for a commission, a rate or a partner, so the ordering cannot follow the money. Every item is ordered by who the reader is.

Q: Why is there no price shown?

Because we have no licensed way to keep a price current, and a stale price on a page like this is worse than none. Cost is shown as a band instead — budget, mid-range or premium.

田字格 paper, character books and the small kit that makes writing by hand a habit.

Free on this site, right now

You can print 田字格 practice sheets from this site for nothing, sized for any character you like, and for most people that is the right answer — the paper is the cheapest part of learning to write and a printer already covers it. What a bought notebook adds is that it is already there, bound, on the desk, when the printer is out of ink and the intention to practise is fragile. That is a real effect and it is the only honest argument for buying one.

The books below are a different thing from the textbooks on the HSK page: they teach the internal logic of characters — components, phonetic hints, the reason 请 and 清 share a shape — which is what makes the fifteen-hundredth character easier than the fiftieth rather than harder. That knowledge is what no amount of repetition on ruled paper gives you.

Every item below says what it does not do. Nothing is ordered by what it pays — see how this page is written.

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Showing every level in this category.

Beginner Budget

田字格 Chinese character practice notebook

various publishers

The square-with-a-cross grid that Chinese children learn to write in, and the reason it exists is proportion: the cross shows you where the centre of the character falls, which is the thing beginners get wrong and cannot see themselves getting wrong. Buy one with reasonably large squares — around 15 to 20 mm — because small squares force you to write fast and sloppy at exactly the stage where slow and deliberate is the whole point.

What it does not do: It is blank paper. It will not tell you the stroke order, correct you, or give you anything to write — you need a character list and a stroke-order reference open beside it, both of which are free on this site.

Free here first: Print the same grids, free

Look it up on amazon.ca

Beginner Mid-range

Learning Chinese Characters (Volumes 1–2)

Alison and Laurence Matthews · Tuttle

A mnemonic approach done carefully: every character is broken into components you have already met, given a story that links them to the meaning, and — the part that makes this better than most memory-trick books — a separate cue for the pronunciation and the tone, which mnemonic systems usually abandon. It covers the HSK 1–3 range across two volumes and it is the book to hand someone who insists characters are arbitrary.

What it does not do: The stories are somebody else's, and mnemonics you did not invent are far less sticky than ones you did. It is slow going — perhaps ten characters a session — so it does not suit anyone trying to cram for a near exam date.

Free here first: 101 radicals explained, free

Look it up on amazon.ca

Intermediate Mid-range

Remembering Simplified Hanzi, Book 1

James Heisig and Timothy Richardson

The systematic version of the same idea, and it is divisive for a reason worth understanding before you buy. Heisig teaches you to write and recall the meaning of 1,500 characters by building them from a fixed set of primitives, in an order chosen for the components rather than for usefulness — and he deliberately leaves the pronunciation until a later book. People who finish it can write a very large number of characters from memory. Many people do not finish it.

What it does not do: You will spend months learning characters you cannot say, in an order that means you cannot read anything as you go. If you need to use Chinese soon, or you need the motivation of visible progress, this is the wrong book.

Free here first: Find a character by its parts, free

Look it up on amazon.ca

Beginner Budget

Blank index cards or flashcard packs

any stationery brand

Unglamorous and disproportionately effective. Writing a card by hand is itself a rehearsal of the character, the physical stack gives you an honest picture of how much you actually know, and sorting it into piles is spaced repetition with no app, no account and no subscription. Keep one word per card, the character on one side and the reading plus meaning on the other, and never write the English on the same side as the character.

What it does not do: It does not schedule itself, so the reviewing discipline is entirely yours — which is the one thing the free spaced-repetition deck on this site does do. A large physical deck also becomes unwieldy past a few hundred cards.

Free here first: Free spaced-repetition deck, nothing stored on our servers

Look it up on amazon.ca

Elementary Budget

Water-writing calligraphy cloth and brush set

various makers

A thick fabric mat that darkens where a wet brush touches it and fades back to blank in a few minutes, so a single cloth takes an unlimited amount of practice with no ink, no paper and no mess. The reason to write with a brush at all is that it makes stroke direction and stroke order physically obvious in a way a pen does not — you cannot fake a stroke backwards with a brush. Enjoyable in a way flashcards are not, which matters.

What it does not do: It is calligraphy practice, not vocabulary practice: it will improve how your characters look and teach you almost no new words. The cheap sets come with poor brushes, and the cloth eventually stops fading evenly.

Free here first: Animated stroke order, free

Look it up on amazon.ca