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Type a character to watch it written one stroke at a time, then print a tracing sheet and write it by hand. Works for all 3,088 characters in the official HSK 3.0 word list — and for most characters outside it too.
Stroke order is not decoration. It decides how a character looks when you write it at speed, it is what handwriting-input keyboards match against when you draw a character with your finger, and it is the order dictionaries use to index characters that share a radical. Get it wrong consistently and your handwriting stays legible but never looks native — and looking up an unknown character in a paper dictionary becomes guesswork.
The rules are mostly mechanical: top before bottom, left before right, horizontal before crossing vertical, outside before inside, and the closing stroke of an enclosure last. Watching twenty characters animated teaches those rules faster than reading them.
Each character gets a row of 田字格 — the four-quadrant grid used in Chinese primary schools. The dashed cross lines are there so you can judge proportion: most components should sit inside one half of the square, not drift across the middle. The first square shows the character solid, the next two are faded for tracing, and the rest are empty so you write from memory. Print it, or use your browser’s “save as PDF” option in the print dialog to keep a copy.
Every lookup also shows the character’s radical, its component breakdown, and — where one exists — a short note on where the shape came from. Characters are not arbitrary drawings: the vast majority are one part hinting at meaning and one part hinting at sound. Once you can see that split, memorising a new character stops being memorising a picture. Browse the full radical table to see every HSK character grouped by its radical.
These are every character used by the HSK level 1 word list — the smallest complete set worth learning to write. Tap one to open its dictionary entry with stroke order and audio.