Master Chinese stroke order with 8 essential rules. Learn to write characters beautifully and quickly with stroke animation, radical breakdown, and practice techniques.
1. Top to bottom: Write from top downward. 2. Left to right: Horizontal before vertical. 3. Horizontal before vertical: 十 (shí) write horizontal then vertical. 4. Outside before inside: Frame first. 5. Close frame last: After inside strokes. 6. Center before sides: For symmetrical characters. 7. Left-falling before right-falling. 8. Dots and minor strokes last. These rules cover 95% of characters.
Wrong stroke order makes your handwriting look childish to native readers. It also makes characters harder to look up in dictionaries (you count strokes). More importantly, muscle memory from correct stroke order helps you remember characters permanently. AI Lingo Chat's Writing Page shows SVG stroke animations for 9,574 characters — watch the correct order, then trace it yourself.
1. Air writing: Trace characters in the air with your finger while saying the pronunciation. 2. Grid paper: Use 田字格 (field grid) paper to learn proportions. 3. Trace then recall: Trace the character 5 times, then write from memory. 4. Radical grouping: Learn all characters with the same radical together. 5. Speed drills: Write the same character 20 times in 60 seconds for muscle memory.
You can READ more Chinese than you can WRITE. This is normal. Even native Chinese speakers forget how to write rare characters. Focus on writing the top 500 most frequent characters, and just learn to recognize the rest. AI Lingo Chat's Character Decomposition breaks every character into its radicals — perfect for recognition without needing to write every single one.
Guides are great. Practice is better. AI Lingo Chat combines everything you need — structured lessons, AI conversation, pronunciation scoring, flashcards — in one app.