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About StrokeGrid
StrokeGrid is a collection of free browser tools for learning to write Chinese. Students, parents and teachers can connect character shapes, stroke sequence and Mandarin pronunciation without creating an account.
Why use StrokeGrid?
StrokeGrid brings Traditional Chinese Pinyin input and Chinese stroke-order practice together in a free, ad-free browser experience. The clean, tool-first layout keeps the focus on typing, listening and writing.
- Free and ad-free. Use the learning tools without paid access or advertising interrupting your practice.
- No account or installation needed. Open the tool in your browser and start practising, without installing a Chinese keyboard or an app.
- Clean, easy-to-use tools. The input fields and practice controls come first; longer explanations live in separate guides.
- Traditional Chinese character and phrase suggestions. The Pinyin input tool accepts tone-free Pinyin and suggests Traditional Chinese characters and dictionary phrases, with pronunciation and meaning hints.
- Connected handwriting practice. Send the text you choose to the stroke-order tool to practise writing supported characters.
- Learning at your own pace. Slow down stroke animations and replay them. Homework pronunciation also has adjustable speed, including 0.25× on recent lessons; available voices depend on your browser and device.
- Homework that keeps your work. Interactive exercises and writing labs offer saved answers and drafts on the same browser and device, along with pronunciation support and character-count goals where provided.
- Practice beyond the screen. Create printable Chinese handwriting worksheets using your own characters.
Build more balanced Chinese handwriting with tracing
Tracing turns watching a character into practising its movements. In StrokeGrid's Trace mode, you follow each stroke with a mouse or a finger on a phone or tablet. Stroke checking and hints help you practise the sequence and direction, while the guide grid gives you a reference for where strokes begin, cross and end.
Correct stroke order supports fluent, consistent handwriting. Following a familiar sequence lets you practise how the parts of a character fit together instead of deciding where to start each time. Pay attention to stroke length, spacing and the balance between components: these details help characters look clearer, neater and more harmonious. When writing words or phrases, keeping character size and spacing consistent matters too.
Stroke order is a foundation, not a guarantee of beautiful handwriting. Tracing feedback checks the stroke path and sequence; it does not grade calligraphy, pen pressure or overall beauty. For best practice, move from following the model to writing independently:
- Watch the full animation to see the character's structure.
- Use Steps to study one stroke at a time, noticing its direction and placement.
- Trace slowly, then restart to practise the sequence again.
- Write the character on paper without tracing. Compare its proportions and spacing with the model, then practise it in a word or short phrase.
Practise tracing 你好 or make a printable handwriting worksheet to continue with a pencil.
What can I do here?
- Watch Chinese stroke order for the characters and phrases you enter, with Pinyin, bopomofo and browser speech.
- Type Pinyin to find Traditional Chinese characters, choose a word and practise writing it.
- Create printable handwriting sheets with 米字格, 田字格 or plain squares.
- Browse character pages, word pages and interactive homework.
Where do the animations and definitions come from?
Stroke animations use Hanzi Writer, whose character data comes from Make Me a Hanzi. The generated study pages combine character data and dictionary entries with StrokeGrid's practice interface.
The Pinyin and vocabulary tools use HanziDB character information, CC-CEDICT dictionary data distributed through the Hanzi library, OpenCC conversion and pinyin-pro pronunciation conversion. Tools also include curated lesson vocabulary. Short glosses are learning hints and may not show every meaning.
Which writing standard should I follow?
Traditional and Simplified characters can have different forms and stroke counts. Enter the exact form your class uses. Stroke order conventions and printed glyphs can also vary across regions and typefaces; StrokeGrid does not claim that every animation matches every curriculum.
For Taiwan's standard character forms, compare with the Ministry of Education stroke order learning site and your teacher's materials. StrokeGrid is an independent learning tool and is not affiliated with the Ministry of Education.
How should I use pronunciation and meaning hints?
A character can have several readings. Automatically generated pronunciation or a short dictionary definition may need adjustment for the whole sentence. Browser audio depends on the voices available on your device. Use the lesson context and your teacher's pronunciation when they differ from an automatic hint.
Where is homework progress saved?
Supported homework exercises and writing labs save answers and drafts in your browser's local storage on the same device. The page's save status confirms whether saving succeeded. It is not an account sync service. Switching browsers or devices, using private browsing, or clearing site data can make that saved progress unavailable.
How are example sentences improved?
The Pinyin tool separately counts selections of single Chinese characters and approved dictionary words. Searches with no results and transfers to stroke-order practice are counted without their text. Assembled sentences are never included in these analytics. These daily aggregates also expire after 180 days and respect the same browser opt-out.
When quality analytics is enabled, the main stroke-order tool counts lookups of single Chinese characters and an approved list of common words, whether an example is available, requests to play example audio, and categorized example-issue reports. These aggregate counts help prioritize missing examples and manual reviews. They are not Google impressions or unique visitor counts.
This feature does not collect full sentences, homework drafts, arbitrary typed text, names, account identifiers, or browsing histories. It does not split a longer sentence into tracked words. Our analytics database stores daily totals by word and example version for up to 180 days, not individual visitor records. Cloudflare processes network requests and uses the connection address for temporary abuse rate limiting; we do not save that address in the analytics database.
Do Not Track and Global Privacy Control are respected by this feature. You can also turn off lookup analytics on this browser below. Explicit issue reports are unavailable while this setting is off.