Stroke order

HSK 4 characters

The 441 characters the HSK 4 words add. Tap one to watch it drawn stroke by stroke.

What are the stroke order rules?

Top before bottom and left before right. Across before down (十), and left-falling before right-falling (人). Outside before inside, but close the box last (国). The middle before its two sides (小).

Why does stroke order matter?

Characters written in order look right, are faster to write, and are easier to remember. Handwriting input on a phone also reads strokes in their order.

Where do these strokes come from?

Make Me a Hanzi, drawn from Arphic’s fonts (Arphic Public License). Its order follows mainland China’s standard; Taiwan and Hong Kong write a few characters in another order.

More free tools

Chinese words: the HSK list, one page each. Pinyin chart: every syllable, all four tones. Your name in Chinese: how Chinese writes it.

Strokes from Make Me a Hanzi (Arphic Public License). Meanings from CC-CEDICT (CC BY-SA 4.0).