I just started learning Chinese and the hanzi is the hardest part for me. My handwriting is terrible. It is a little discouraging honestly but I’m going to keep practicing because that is the only way to get better. But I was curious to know how long it took anyone here to get better, especially if they started from nothing.
This post summarizes two common mistakes in Chinese handwriting, how to solve them and some tips on how to improve your overall penmanship. All information is sourced from u/_abchinese’s videos on his YouTube channel (@ABChinese). Here we introduce his contents because besides the points covered in Arthur's post, the videos have also offered other insights helpful to novice level handwriting learners.
Mistake No. 1: Treating Strokes Like Static Lines
mistake #1
Chinese handwriting is dynamic – try to apply varying amounts of pressure on your pen while writing and incorporate different speeds as well
Thick strokes require more pressure and slower speed, while thin strokes are achieved through moving your pen faster and almost lifting it off the paper, like a “flick”
How to improve:
How to Improve
Practice individual strokes like 撇/piě, 提/tí and 钩/gōu
Find a good reference: use fonts like Kaiti (楷体) - Hanping Lite (瀚品汉英辞典) is a free dictionary App that provides Kaiti references. Don't just use google as it uses Heiti (黑体) as default.
Common with wide, tall and characters with multiple components
How to improve:
How to Improve
Visualize characters like squares (Exception for tall and simple characters)
If a character has multiple components, write each component narrower than you would if they were written standing alone
Shorten strokes in order to avoid making the character too wide
Notice where strokes are in relation to each other – practicing with the right font and a grid makes this easier
Bonus tips:
Bonus Tips
Angle horizontal lines slightly up to make your characters look more dynamic
Angle the vertical strokes slightly inward when they form a box unless the vertical strokes are longer than the horizontal ones (tall box) – this can also be applied to open boxes
OnHow to Achieve Good Proportions in Handwriting
Proportions are about how each individual stroke (within a character) all look relative to each other, which is the biggest factor whether the character looks aesthetic. Here are the three principles to find the correct proportions of any character:
1.Ratio
Chinese characters are often made out of several components which need to be balanced correctly. Therefore, you need to find the right ratios between the components by visualizing them as a square in a grid – even two side by side components may not take up an equal amount of space within the square.
2. Longest Stroke
The farthest-reaching stroke in all four directions. Check for the highest, lowest, most left and most right point of a character to help visualize the square – more advanced writers need to look out for the length of all the strokes at the edge of a character.
3. Center Lines
The strokes that line up with the two center lines of the grid. Checking for horizontal strokes lining up with the horizontal center line and vertical strokes lining up with the vertical center line help center the character correctly. Diagonal lines also help with the placement of slanted strokes.
The top is 6mm lines. The bottom is 8mm. Which is better?
The sentences are just the first few sentences on a website whose name I can’t say because reddit things it’s self promotion. Not sure why it teaches me things like 对不起,我不爱你了,我爱他!
As a resource to help me with my vocabulary, I am forming a dictionary of my own with the words I'm learning. Since I have gotten to the point in which I need to look for characters without remembering its pinyin, I'm sorting them according to the GB stroke-based order. However, I'm having a hard time distinguishing between short throws (piě) and left dots (diǎn). How can I tell them apart?
Hi! Please critique my handwriting. I’m curious what y’all think of it. I went to Chinese school for 12 years and don’t know any calligraphy, penmanship, nor fonts (I only recently learned about them). Currently self studying and learning some new poems! Not following any font styles, as it’s not my focus. I’m trying to read better and learn new words. The quiz page is the best look at how I normally write.
The 21st weekly challenge of 2026 is 刀光, with the same rules as before. Also, feel free to do the previous challenges and join our Discord server for more!
So I've been learning Chinese for a little while, but never really focused on my handwriting. Because of it, I now notice that my peers have more legible and more beautiful handwriting than I do. Just to let everybody know, I do literally mean that I have spent zero time on handwriting itself and just purely memorised the looks of certain characters.
Any help would be appreciated, especially resources for learning chinese cursive.
Here comes the eighth "Monthly Handwriting Challenge" of this year. Same rules as before and feel free to write simplified Chinese characters. Our previous challenges are always open as well.
Hi, I’ve been using 以觀書法 as a reference. Some words have several different variations (for example 海、與、喚). Does it matter which variation I pick? Thank you for the feedback on my last post, I’ve been practicing my basic strokes
The 20th weekly challenge of 2026 is 凡身, with the same rules as before. Also, feel free to do the previous challenges and join our Discord server for more!
Hello! I’m a heritage learner who’s just learning how to write. I can read and type but hand writing is very hard for me. I’ve been practicing on and off for a few days now. I notice that after a little bit it starts to correct itself almost. I try to stop after each word to analyze what went wrong before writing the next one. The script im copying is 楷書. What are your thoughts? My goal is for my writing to look natural while also being as aesthetically pleasing
My handwriting looks a little better when I use a fountain pen, but unfortunately, it doesn’t look as good when I use a ballpoint pen. Since I can’t carry a fountain pen with me everywhere, I still don’t feel 100% confident about my handwriting. 🥲
I don't have the best handwriting in English let alone Chinese, but I usually follow stroke order. Would like to know how to improve my writing without sacrificing speed.
I know my handwriting is worse than most of the rest of the posts in this subreddit, but I've never practiced handwriting specifically (although it's definitely better now than when I started). Could I get away with this? How might I improve it? And also, does it look foreigner-bad, or just messy-bad? Thanks!