Your Chinese name in 田字格, stroke by stroke

How to use the card

Read each character's first row left to right: every square adds one stroke, drawn in red, with a dot where your pen goes down. The strokes already written are black and the ones still to come are faint, so you can see where the new stroke sits in the finished character. Say the stroke out loud as you go — the count is printed beside the character, and getting to the right number is the first check that the order was right.

Then trace the grey row, and write the character in the empty squares without looking. Finish with the rows at the bottom, which put the whole name together: a name is written as one unit, and the spacing between the characters is part of what makes it look written rather than assembled.

Where the strokes and readings come from

The strokes are drawn from the same stroke data as the site's stroke order animator and the stroke order drill, so the card agrees with both. The reading, stroke count and meaning of each character come from the Chinese name checker, which is also what decides which characters are the surname — and it reads a one-character surname the way a surname is read, which is not always the everyday reading of that character.

For practice sheets of any characters, not only a name, use the 田字格 practice sheet generator. To check what your name actually says before you learn to write it, run it through the name checker first.

Questions people ask

Can this turn my English name into Chinese?

No. It writes out a Chinese name you already have. The name generator suggests one, and the name checker tells you what any Chinese name says.

How do I save it as a PDF?

Press Print / Save as PDF and choose “Save as PDF” as the destination. The navigation, buttons and ads are left off the printout.

Is my name stored?

No. It is written onto the card and shown back to you, and it is never stored, logged or put in the address bar.