Why these 20
If you have never written a Chinese character before, start here. Ten of these twenty are still recognisable pictures — a person mid-stride, three mountain peaks, a stream with its current lines. The other ten are signs rather than pictures: 一二三 count in strokes, 上 and 下 are a mark above and below a line. None takes more than five strokes, and fifteen of the twenty turn up again as the radical of at least three other characters in this site's database, so the hand you train here is the hand you will use on much harder characters.
For the teacher
What a learner should be able to do afterwards
- Hold a pen to a 田字格 and place a character inside it rather than beside it
- Write nineteen characters of four strokes or fewer without looking at the model
- Say which of two characters has more strokes — the first real skill in reading handwriting
Running it
- Start with 一 二 三 and stop there for the first session. Three characters is not a small start; it is the whole idea of the grid learned on shapes that cannot go wrong.
- 日 月 山 水 火 木 are the six that still look like what they mean. Ask what each one is a picture of before giving the answer — a wrong guess that gets corrected sticks better than a right answer that was handed over.
- 上 and 下 are the pair to write one after the other. They are the same idea flipped, and writing them back to back is the fastest way to stop mixing them up later.
- Every character here is written identically in simplified and traditional, so nothing on this sheet has to be unlearned by a student who later moves to Taiwan or Hong Kong.
These notes were written from general teaching practice; not yet reviewed by a classroom teacher. If you teach and something here is wrong, we would rather hear it than not.
All 20 characters
| 一 | yī | one | 1 strokes |
| 二 | èr | two | 2 strokes |
| 三 | sān | three | 3 strokes |
| 人 | rén | person | 2 strokes |
| 大 | dà | big | 3 strokes |
| 小 | xiǎo | small | 3 strokes |
| 口 | kǒu | mouth | 3 strokes |
| 日 | rì | sun; day | 4 strokes |
| 月 | yuè | moon; month | 4 strokes |
| 山 | shān | mountain | 3 strokes |
| 水 | shuǐ | water | 4 strokes |
| 火 | huǒ | fire | 4 strokes |
| 木 | mù | tree; wood | 4 strokes |
| 土 | tǔ | earth; soil | 3 strokes |
| 上 | shàng | above; up | 3 strokes |
| 下 | xià | below; down | 3 strokes |
| 中 | zhōng | middle; China | 4 strokes |
| 天 | tiān | sky; day | 4 strokes |
| 目 | mù | eye | 5 strokes |
| 力 | lì | strength | 2 strokes |
Questions people ask
Yes, more than it looks. The standard order is what makes handwriting legible at speed and it is how dictionaries and handwriting input are indexed. Getting it right on twenty simple characters now saves undoing a habit on two thousand later.
Learn whichever is used where you are heading: simplified for mainland China and Singapore, traditional for Taiwan, Hong Kong and Macau. It makes no difference to this pack — all twenty of these characters are written identically in both.