Practice Handwriting Chinese Characters!

When I first started learning Mandarin Chinese, it was just my wife and I in the car, and she would teach me a few words here and there. Later, I started using some youtube videos and podcasts and my only goal was to speak and understand. The character system was so foreign and intimidating to me I figured I could just ignore it. I've actually heard some other learners say the same thing, but now I know it's not the way. When I started using Hello Chinese, I ended up learning the characters and eventually turned the pinyin mode off. It turns out having the characters to tie meaning to really helps with the ability to separate similar sounding words and understand the language on a deeper level. Eventually, I could read entire graded readers with minimal assistance!

But there were still some problems. The only "writing" I had done was using pinyin based keyboards. This still helps train some recall and recognition, but you have so much context in that kind of writing. On occasion, I'd get similar characters confused. For example: 其 and 真, or 成 and 城. Sometimes they'd just have a similar shape, other times there would just be a single differing 部首 (radical/component). I had learned to recognize the characters as wholes, but I didn't understand how to look at the smaller components to figure out the meaning of similar looking, or even new characters I hadn't seen before.

I started trying to copy handwriting on paper, but it's pretty tedious and honestly my goal was not to be able to actually handwrite. Just to improve my recognition. So, I built it into bookchoy!

Now you can take the words saved in your SRS and practice writing them stroke by stroke. I've already started to notice an improvement in my reading and overall understanding of characters. There are definitely some improvements to be made, currently it's too easy to just get a hint for every stroke. For now I think it's a pretty nice addition, and I hope you find it useful!