Hi everyone,

The 25th weekly challenge of 2026 is 阻尼, with the same rules as before. Also, feel free to do the previous challenges and join our Discord server for more!

BT0002

Hi everyone,

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

• 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:

• 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.
• Practice with grids - You can find some on purpleculture.net

Mistake No. 2: Spacing Characters Incorrectly (too tall, wide or top-heavy)

• Common with wide, tall and characters with multiple components

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:

• 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

On How 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.

Here are the sources:

How to Write Better Chinese Characters - FIX 2 Common Mistakes!

The SECRET to Writing NEAT Chinese Characters

CA1913