Three games that make characters stick.
Next Stroke — 90 seconds on the clock; four strokes on the table, exactly one comes next. Pick right and the
character keeps building; pick wrong and you lose three seconds.
Ink Check — write a character from pinyin and memory, and get scored stroke by stroke on order, shape and placement.
Hunt — 木 本 末 未… four lookalikes, one meaning shown. Tap the right character before the round timer runs out.
No signup, no waiting — the characters you miss turn into a practice sheet.
90-second next-stroke sprint
Choose a level. The clock only starts when you press start.
- 1A character starts drawing itself.
You see the strokes already written, and the stroke count left.
- 2Pick the stroke that comes next.
Tap a tile, or press 1–4. The shapes are real strokes, not arrows.
- 3Chain them.
Every correct answer builds a multiplier. A wrong answer costs three seconds.
One character completed is worth a +50 bonus. Finishing a character in one streak is where the points are.
New game: Hanzi Hunt — 木 本 末 未, which one means root? Spot the lookalike in 90 seconds.
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Tap one to see its full stroke order, or turn them all into one worksheet.
Want the whole set on paper? The five-book library covers 500 characters with the same stroke data used in this game.
See the library →Ink Check #1
Read the pinyin, write the character from memory — one stroke per drag, in writing order.
Scoring: stroke count and order first, then each stroke's shape and placement. One drag is one stroke — lift between strokes the way you would on paper. Peeking costs 10 points; your pride is free.
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How Hunt works
- 1
You get a pinyin + meaning
like gēn — root. The grid shows a family of lookalikes: 木本末未朱.
- 2
Tap the right character
Correct = points + time bonus + streak multiplier. Wrong tap = −3 seconds.
- 3
Beat the round clock
12 seconds per round. Too slow and the answer walks away — and joins your practice sheet.
Stroke shapes, medians and stroke count come from Make Me a Hanzi. Scores are stored in your browser only — there is no account and nothing is uploaded.
Recognition is not recall
Watching a stroke-order animation feels like learning, but the animation is doing the remembering for you. Here the strokes are withheld and you have to produce the next one. That gap — between “I recognise it” and “I can recall it” — is where stroke order is actually stored.
Wrong answers are the useful part
The four tiles are real strokes from the same character, not random shapes. When you pick the wrong one you are usually picking the stroke that looks right in isolation but belongs somewhere else — which is exactly the mistake that shows up on paper.
End with paper, not a screen
Every round ends with a list of the characters you got wrong and a single button that turns them into a printable 米字格 worksheet. Tracing the ones you missed, right after missing them, is the cheapest correction you will get all day.
How Ink Check works
You see the pinyin and the meaning — the character is up to you. Write it in the grid, one stroke per drag, in the order you would write it on paper. The judge compares what you drew with the reference stroke data: first whether you used the right number of strokes, then whether each stroke is the right stroke — its shape, its start and end direction, and where it sits in the square. You get a score out of 100, a verdict per stroke, and an overlay of your ink over the correct glyph. Wrong strokes turn red, so you see exactly which habit to unlearn. From there, one tap turns the character into a printable practice sheet — which is how a 46/100 becomes a 90 next week.
The ten characters learners most often write out of order
These are short, common and full of traps: strokes that look like they should go left-to-right but do not, and enclosure strokes that have to be written before their contents.
Open any of them for the animated order, the stroke names in pinyin, and a practice sheet.