The handwriting practice worksheets are based on the latest PDF specification. Some old versions of PDF viewers may not be able to view the PDF files. The message will disappear if you upgrade your Acrobat Reader (or other PDF viewers) to the latest version.

You can simply click the Print button on the toolbar to generate the worksheets for the characters you have studied online via the Stroke Order Animation or the Worksheets page.

If you want to generate Chinese worksheets quickly without going through the character animations, you can simply copy and paste Chinese characters to the Print Chinese Character Worksheets box on the Worksheets page, and then hit the Print Chinese Character Worksheets button. This powerful feature is very handy for Chinese language teachers to create teaching materials.

To generate general-purpose blank worksheets, go to Worksheets page.

Arch Chinese provides fine-grained control over the handwriting worksheet generation. On the Worksheet tab of the Options pop-up, you can set:

• For each character, create how many shaded characters for tracing
• For each character, reserve how many blank writing boxes for practice without tracing
• For the stroke sequences, the color of the written strokes
• For the stroke sequences, the color of the new strokes. By default, it is light yellow, which will be printed as light gray on a black & white printer.
• The color of shaded characters. By default, it is light blue, which will be printed as light gray on a black & white printer
• The color of the grid.
• The color of the radical. By default, it is blue.
• The style of the writing boxes. You can select Blank, Diagonal, Cross or Square
• The size of the writing boxes. You can select Tiny, Small, Medium, Large or Huge

We have tested the worksheets on a range of black & white printers. The default settings should be good, but you are free to tweak the settings to find the combination you like.

To reset the settings to the default values, click the Reset configuration settings button on the System & Security tab of the Options pop-up.

Note that this site uses a pop-up window to display the generated worksheets. If your browser is configured to block pop-ups, you need to allow this site to open pop-ups.You need to register and sign in to generate worksheets that have stroke sequences for individual characters. You can sign in when you are using Stroke Order Animation or Worksheets pages, where you generate writing worksheets.

Click anywhere outside the pop-ups to close them. If you have made changes on the Display Options pop-up, all the changes will be saved and applied automatically. The changes you have made on the Stroke Order Animations page applies to the Worksheets page too.

On the up-right corner of the page, there is a Sign In link when you are on the Stroke Order Animation or Worksheets page. Before you hit the Print button on the toolbar, click the Sign In link to enter your member serial key. After you sign in, the system remembers you for a certain period of time, 15 days by default. You need to make sure to sign out if you are using public computers in libraries, cafes or schools. You can go to the System and Security tab of the Options pop-up to set how long the system should remember you.

Yes, you can provide your own English definitions and Pinyin for any characters in the system. Here are the steps:

1. Clear up the studied history by clicking the Delete button on the Studied History pop-up. You can click the paper roll icon on the toolbar to bring it up.
2. Click the Imported Characters button on the toolbar to import the characters for which you want to provide your own definitions and Pinyin. The Imported Characters button is on the left of the Studied History button.
3. One character at a time, click the characters on the Imported Characters pop-up. When the character information is displayed, click the Customize button (which has a pencil/paper icon) on the up-right corner of the animated character. The English definition and Pinyin edit boxes will be shown on the left side of the page. Press Save after you change the English definitions and Pinyin.
4. Generate worksheets for the customized and other characters

The customized definitions apply for both worksheet generation and character animations. Care must be taken to avoid long definitions because the worksheet character boxes are small. The worksheet generator will ignore the English definition if it is too long. If you have to use long definitions, you can use the Chinese phrase handout generator, which is designed to create and print handouts for Chinese phrases and sentences,. In this case, instead of entering phrase, Pinyin and English, you enter a character, the Pinyin for the character and your definitions. The Chinese phrase handout generator allows you to generate a worksheet where you can start tracing the characters and write the phrases that use the characters.

If your browser is configured to block pop-up windows, you need to configure it to allow pop-up windows for www.archchinese.com and www.stlplace.com. The generated worksheet is shown in separated pop-up window. If you have installed third party applications to block pop-ups, be sure to consult the vendor documentation to allow pop-up windows for the two sites.

Instead of showing them in a pop-up window, you can configure the system to save the worksheets right after they have been generated. Here are the steps:

Go to Chinese Character Worksheets page and click the Settings icon on the toolbar to bring up the Settings pop-up. On the pop-up, click System and Security tab. On the System and Security tab, change the option 5, Optimize the User interface for, from Auto to Performance.

Some users have found it very useful to slow down the time between strokes. The default pause time between strokes is one second. You can adjust the pause time through the Animation tab on the Options pop-up.

On the same tab, you can also adjust the time interval between characters when animating multiple characters continuously. You can click the Slideshow button on the toolbar to watch the animation of all the studied characters. You can also watch the animation of all the imported characters by clicking Slideshow button on the Imported Characters pop-up.

When a character is being animated, in addition to example words and sentences, the character decomposition explorer shows the composition of the character. The character decomposition explorer is an integral part of the Chinese character animator. It allows you to drill down into the character components one level at a time. This feature can help you understand what components a character is made up from and how characters are related to each other. When a character is animated, the first level component(s) and radical are displayed automatically. Radicals are displayed as in blue and non-radical components are displayed in black. If the component can be further decomposed, you can click the component to expand it and view the components of the component. The Pinyin and English definitions are shown next to the component or radical. You can also double click a component or radical in the explorer to view more detailed information, such as stroke order, character structure and pronunciation, etc.

Go to the Worksheets page, copy and paste the Chinese characters to the Print Chinese Character Worksheets character box and hit the Print Chinese Character Worksheets button. For performance reasons, we have put a cap on this feature. You can print max 20 characters at a time.

If you want to generate more than 20 characters in one go, you can Import them via the Imported Characters pop-up and hit the Slideshow button to let the system play the animations continuously. After the animations are done, hit the Print button on the toolbar to generate the worksheets. With this approach, you can generate worksheets for up to 100 characters. We strongly recommend you break the large character list to smaller pieces, say 10 characters. The system performs best with small character lists.

This system runs on all major browsers, including Internet Explorer 6.x & 7.0, Firefox 1.5, 2.x & 3.0, Safari 3.x, Opera 9.x and Google Chrome. The system works on Windows, Linux and MacOS X. Minimum screen resolution is 800X600. If you can watch YouTube videos on your browser, you should be able to run this tool. Since the worksheet PDF files are based on latest PDF specification, you may need to upgrade your Acrobat Reader (or other PDF viewers) to the latest versions

After you import the characters or phrases you want to study, get a cup of coffee and then click the Slideshow button on Imported Characters pop-up. The system automatically demonstrates the stroke order, along with pronunciation, English definitions, stroke number, example phrases and example sentences, for the imported characters. You can adjust the speed and intervals between characters via the Display Option pop-up.

Similarly, you can watch the animations for all the studied characters after you have studied them. You can do that by clicking the Slideshow button on the toolbar. Alternatively, you can click the Slideshow button on the Studied Characters pop-up.

You can look up characters, Chinese sentences or phrases by Pinyin, character radical, English definition, English phrase, English sentence fragment, character itself, Chinese phrase or Chinese sentence fragment.

a. By Pinyin
To look up a character by Pinyin, enter a Pinyin string, such as wo3 and zhong1, and click the Search button. Use v for ü, for example lv3 for lǚ. Also, the tone numbers, 1,2,3 or 4, are required and they must be at the end of the Pinyin string.

b. By Radicals
To look up a character by character radicals, you can click the Chinese radical table link. The Chinese radical table lists all the radicals for the simplified Chinese characters, grouped by stroke count. The English meaning of each radical will be displayed as tooltip when you move your mouse over it. To look up a character, you can click the radical. All the simplified characters with the radical will show up. Again, the English definition, along with Pinyin, of each Chinese character will be shown as tooltip when you move your mouse over it. You can order the characters by usage frequency, stroke count or alphabetically (based on their pronunciations). After you locate the character you are looking for, you can click it to view the details.

c. By English
To search a character by English, simply type an English definition, such as me and Chinese, and click the Search button.

Tip: if you cannot find the corresponding Chinese characters, which is common if a single character cannot describe the meaning of the English word, use the powerful Wildcard Search. Say, you are looking for the corresponding characters for computer, you can enter computer * and then hit the Search button (Note that there is a space between the word and asterisk). All the computer related Chinese sentences will show up. After you find the character in the sentences, you can click the character or copy and paste it to the search box to view the stroke order animation and other information.

d. By English Phrases
To search the corresponding Chinese phrases or sentences for an English phrase, enter a phrase, for examples, Chinese food, chicken soup, good luck, etc. and then click the Search button.

e. By English Sentence Fragments
This is similar to the search by English phrases. Simply enter a sentence fragment, such as, prefer to, might as well, my Chinese teacher, am going to, He is a big boy now etc. The system looks up the Chinese-English dictionary and sentence repository to find the corresponding Chinese words and sentences.

f. By Characters
To search English definition and stroke order information for a Chinese character, you can enter a Chinese character to the search box using your favorite Chinese character Input Method Editor(IME), and then hit the Search button. Alternatively, you can copy and paste a Chinese character from other sources, such as files or web pages, and then click the Search button.

g. By Phrases
If you are looking for the example usages of a phrase or idiom, for an example, 动物园(zoo), you can copy and paste (or enter using an IME) the phrase or idiom to the search box and hit the Search button. The search results, if any, will display on the example sentences area.

h. By Sentence Patterns Or Any Sentence Fragments
If you are looking for the example usages of sentence structures or patterns, such as 与其...不如 (instead of..., might as well...), you can copy and paste the patterns into the search box and then hit the search button. Again, the example usages, if any in the system, will show up on the example sentence area. In fact, you can search any entire sentences as well.

Yes. you will notice minor discrepancies when you compare textbooks from Mainland China and Taiwan. In this system, the stroke orders for simplified Chinese characters are strictly based on 《现代汉语通用字笔顺规范》 (Modern Chinese Commonly Used Character Stroke Order Standard) published by 国家语委和中华人民共和国新闻出版署(China National Language And Character Working Committee and General Administration of Press and Publication of the Peoples' Republic of China) in 1997. For traditional Chinese characters, which are used in Taiwan and Hong Kong, Arch Chinese follows the standard issued by Taiwan Ministry of Education.

Click the animated character or the Next Stroke button on the toolbar to switch the system to the interactive mode.

We apologize for the inconvenience. Please go to Chinese Character Worksheets page and click the Settings icon on the toolbar to bring up the Settings pop-up. On the pop-up, click System and Security tab. On the System and Security tab, change the option 5, Optimize the User interface for, from Auto to Performance. After that, you should be able to generate worksheets and handouts even stlplace.com is down.

We have put a cap to avoid users to generate unusual large amount of worksheets in a short period of time. That means, unless you have generated worksheets for thousands of characters, you should not see that message. If you did get this message, let us know. Usually we will resolve this issue for you quickly.

Below the animation box is the usage examples of the character. You can click Chinese characters in the usage example box to learn how to write them as well. On the left and right ends of the example phrases, the Prev Page and Next Page buttons allow you view more usage examples.

The example sentences are shown on the left side of the page. Because we have a large example sentence repository for frequently used characters, again you can use the Prev and Next buttons to get additional examples that aren't shown on the screen. Except for the animated character, all other characters in the example sentences are hyperlinked. That is, with one click, you can find the stroke information, English definitions, etc for the individual characters of a sentence.

It seems you were generating worksheets on the Stroke Order Animation and Dictionary page. To remove a character press & hold the Ctrl key, and then click the character on the Study History pop-up. You can remove all the characters by clicking the Delete button on the Study History pop-up. You can bring up the Study History pop-up by clicking the paper roll icon on the toolbar.

There are multiple places that you can print worksheets. The most convenient way is go to:

http://www.archchinese.com/arch_writing_worksheets.html

enter the characters you want to print on the up-left box and then press the Generate Worksheet button.

The system has an anti-bot mechanism to fend off bots and other malicious attacks. You have been mistakenly identified by the system as a bot. Send us email and we will unlock it quickly. If you are a registered member, please sign in. A registered user will never be blocked.

Yes, once you are a member, you can generate worksheets for any characters defined in the national standard character set of China and over 7000 traditional Chinese characters.

Yes. This is one of the best features of the Arch Chinese learning tool. You can select a character from

• Search result pop-up
• Imported character pop-up
• Studied character pop-up
• Example phrases
• Example sentences
• Characters with a Pinyin syllable in Pinyin table
• Characters with a radical in radical table
• Characters on the character decomposition explorer

Once a character is selected, the animation will start automatically. You can click the character in the center box to write the character stroke-by-stroke interactively. When all the strokes for the character are written, it will start over again.

Alternatively, you can click the Stroke Forward button on the toolbar to write the strokes interactively. After the character is written, the system plays the pronunciation of the character automatically.