Here are our favourite resources for practising your own Chinese and Japanese character

For regular note-taking and writing practice, everyone has their own preferences for paper-lined or unlined, spiral bound, A4, A5, 100gsm. Then there are the writing implements – pens, pencils, markers.  Some people prefer just to record audio, or use a laptop or netbook.  Even with all of these choices, when it comes to specialist paper for writing Asian characters, it can be difficult to find what you want if you don’t live in a place with a large Asian community.

 

Photo via Pixabay

I’ve found a few online resources for downloading and printing your own character practice pages and will list them below.  Please add more in the comments if you know of any!

Dr Lili Worksheet – Character worksheet with spaces for name and date.  Grid with horizontal and vertical internal lines. It has room under each line for writing pinyin/notes.

Dofufa practice paper – Character practice paper with three different sizes of grid.  Internal horizontal and vertical lines.

Incompetech free online graph paper – Probably my favourite resource for printing paper.  They have a lot of different kinds of graph paper, as well as note-taking paper and a few options for Chinese and Japanese character practice.  Their graph paper generator allows you to choose the size of your paper, the size of the grids, and even what colour you would like to print in.  Try printing in landscape mode for even more options.  My favourite is the Chinese Character Guide (X-style), which has room for writing pinyin as well as diagonal internal lines.

Good luck with the practice!