Chinese Stroke Order & Practice Sheet Generator

It matters for three practical reasons. Handwritten characters are judged on it — a character written in the wrong order usually looks slightly wrong even to someone who cannot say why. Chinese input methods that accept handwriting recognise characters by stroke sequence and direction. And stroke order is what makes characters memorable: once you internalise the rules, you can write a character you have only read, because the order is predictable.

Type your characters into the generator above, pick your grid and sheet style, then press Print / Save as PDF. The printed page contains only the practice grid — navigation, buttons and form fields are removed automatically. Choose A4 and, in Chrome or Edge, pick "Save as PDF" instead of a printer if you want a file. Set margins to Default; the sheet is built to fit.

田字格 (field grid) is a square with a dashed cross, giving four zones and marking the centre. 米字格 (rice grid) adds two diagonals for eight zones. 田字格 is the standard beginner grid; 米字格 gives more guidance on slanted strokes. Both are available in the generator.

Most characters have between five and twelve strokes, but the range is wide: 一 has one, 我 has seven, and some rare characters have more than thirty. The stroke order lookup above tells you the exact count for any character in our library — the number is shown next to the character.

Not for pinyin input — you type the sound and pick from a list, which is what almost everyone uses. Stroke order matters for handwriting input (used on phones and on a graphics tablet) and for the Cangjie or Wubi keyboard layouts, which are built directly on stroke shapes. For a beginner, learn pinyin typing first and pick up stroke order for writing by hand.

Yes. Print as many as you like, for yourself or for a class — no permission needed and no attribution required on the printed sheet. The only thing we ask is that you do not resell the generated files as your own product.

The lookup covers the characters used across our free material — the 642-card library, the 500-phrase pack and the Starter Kit — plus the classic teaching examples such as 永, the character behind 永字八法, which contains all eight basic strokes. That is a deliberate limit rather than a technical one: for characters outside that set we show a message instead of guessing, because showing the wrong stroke order is worse than showing none. The practice sheet in the section above works for any character you can type, in any font your system has.