In our previous lessons on how to write Chinese characters we taught you the two fundamental rules for drawing Chinese characters. Draw them from left to right and top to bottom. Today we add a third rule of thumb that is just as easy to remember:

  • 从外到内:月、风、内、肉、用、周、网、同、义、床、厅、闲、闭、问、闻、闯、病、疼、房、局、句、勾、勺

As in the list above, Chinese has many characters with a box-like structure. It is common to run into characters with strokes or radicals drawn inside spaces created by other strokes or radicals. A good example is the character 闲, which has the 木 radical drawn inside the 门 radical. The general rule of thumb in these cases is to draw our exterior casing first, and then fill in the interior.

There are a few exceptions to this rule that we will cover in later lessons. But generally speaking, if you can keep these three rules in mind you are already capable of correctly writing about 70 percent of the Chinese characters out there. So click through to the Writing section of this lesson and start practicing. Our Writing Pad will correct any mistakes you make and help you internalize proper stroke order. It is also a lot of fun. Once you know the proper stroke order print out a copy of our hanzi writing sheets for practice on the go and incorporate character writing into your regular study program. Good luck and happy writing!
 said on
August 11, 2009
Lovely application. It would be nice if this were available for use elsewhere on the site. I'd like to just visit it and test myself on random characters.

Can we also put a button somewhere so I can switch between traditional and simplified characters? There is no transcript for this lesson so no easy way to do that.
 said on
August 12, 2009
It's very nice. I'm ashamed to say I haven't begun to learn how to write. It's just that I don't really seem to need to, with computers etc, and any time I'd spend studying this would take away from learning things which would bring me closer to being able to comprehend written and spoken Chinese.

I'm not proud of it. I guess I just need to "man up" :-)
 said on
August 12, 2009
@mat - yeah, I'm pretty proud of this. Aiming for something simple that accomplishes one thing: making sure people know how to write the characters and write them in the proper stroke order.

That said, I think writing is easier than most people think so it shouldn't take long to pick up. There aren't that many rules and once you've internalized them you can write pretty much any character you want. Perhaps not important for learning to speak, but very helpful for being able to learn new characters from reading and quickly spotting the differences between similar ones.

@bonita - next version of the site will have a standalone version of the Writing Pad that will cycle randomly through characters depending on your display preferences.
 said on
August 13, 2009
useful. should add a save option so I get prompted more with the characters I have trouble with.