Practice · handwriting
Write whole words, not just characters.
Writing single characters teaches you the shapes. Writing words teaches you the spacing, the proportions and the order you would actually need, because a character written on its own and the same character squeezed next to another are not the same job.
This word, character by character
- Top to bottom, left to right.
- Horizontal strokes before crossing vertical ones (十 = horizontal, then vertical).
- Outside before inside - but close a box last (口).
- A vertical that passes all the way through comes last (中).
- Left-falling diagonal before right-falling (大).
Stroke order data from KanjiVGby Ulrich Apel and contributors, used and modified underCC BY-SA 3.0. The stroke data and our changes to it stay under that licence; see theterms.
Why words rather than characters
A character on its own gets the whole square. In a word it has to share, and the parts that shrink are not the parts a beginner expects. Writing 学校 teaches you something that writing 学 and 校 separately does not.
The same two passes as the single-character drill: trace it with the guide on, write it again from memory with the guide off, then the guide comes back over your strokes so you can see where you went wrong before you move on.
Single characters instead? Writing practice. On paper? Printable sheets.