Stroke order

Why this exists

Taken out of the books, so it could be big enough to use.

The practice pages used to carry the stroke order themselves: a grey model in a small square, with a number at the start of every stroke. On paper those numbers came out about a millimetre tall, light grey on cream, and nobody was reading them.

Setting them larger inside the book was not the answer either, because on a dense character the numbers crowd each other rather than the page. So stroke order came out of the books altogether and was given a document of its own. The practice squares now hold a clean model to trace. The numbers live here, at 128pt, where every one of them can be read.

What is in one

A reference, not a workbook.

There are no tracing boxes. The books already have those, and repeating them here would double the page count for nothing. What this adds is every character in that volume, drawn once, large, with the order to draw it in, so you can look up anything you have met.

Three pages open it: how to read the diagrams and the two rules that cover most characters, then 言 built one stroke at a time, and the thing nobody tells beginners early enough, which is that the printed shape and the written shape are not quite the same. What changes is the shape of a mark, never the order, so the numbers hold either way.

Then the characters, nine to a page, easiest level first and within a level by how often it turns up in that book.

Download

One per volume. Free.

8.5 × 11, the same trim as the books, with margins safe on any home printer. Pick the volume you are working through.