In this post I’ll show you how you can discover how to write any Chinese character that you want to learn.
This is a really useful thing to be able to do because I recommend that you learn to write Chinese characters by copying a lot of different examples and from learning by practice. This is how I learnt Chinese.
Here are two websites you can use, and two pieces of software.
Go to the site, click on Dictionary and then you can type in the Pinyin for the character you want to look up or the English word or you can even type the character in using whatever Chinese input method you might have on your computer.
The website will show you exactly how to write the Chinese character, the radical and the definition.
Another really useful site for looking up Chinese characters. You can enter characters by typing them with your computer, using the pinyin of the character or simply by pasting a character in.
There’s also a tool (see the video above) to show you how to write the character, stroke by stroke, the number of strokes and the radical etc.
This is a free piece of software that you can download, which includes a free (but pretty usable) dictionary.
You can enter Chinese characters by typing them or by pasting them into the window.
To find out how a particular character is written, just right click on it, then click Find in Dictionary, then Show Stroke Order.
Another piece of software that shows you how to write Chinese characters is Wenlin.
It is paid software, but the dictionary is a bit better than the ones in most of the free software, and the software has a lot of useful information about the origins of the Chinese characters. I used it for years back when I was doing a university course in Chinese.
If you click on any character in Wenlin using the ‘hand’ pointer, the dictionary will show you the Pinyin pronunciation, the radical, all the definitions, and even the words containing the character.
To get the stroke order guide for the character, just click the arrow to the left of where it says ‘Stroke’, then click on the ‘fast forward arrow’ key, or click on the ‘forward’ key just to see the next stroke.
So that’s it! It’s actually pretty easy to find out how to write Chinese characters. Now all you have to do is practice 🙂