It’s attractive and was clearly crafted with care. You’re not allowed to write incorrect strokes. Yes, a green star tells you where to start writing when you go off track. Because most of the apps are largely about practicing writing, I’m going to talk mostly about the concepts of tracing and feedback. This issue goes way beyond the scope of this blog post, but the point is that most of the apps out there now stick mainly to #5. Provide practice writing the characters and give feedback.

Introduce new characters in a progressive way, building on what has come before, while still trying to stick to useful characters as much as possible.ĥ. Introduce the various structural types exhibited by Chinese characters, and the order in which characters’ various component parts should be written.Ĥ. Introduce the building blocks of Chinese characters, calling attention to how they function is a part of a whole.ģ. Introduce the basic strokes, emphasizing the direction in which each is written and the shape of each.Ģ. To effectively teach the writing of Chinese characters in a comprehensive way, an app would need to do the following:ġ. It’s easier to focus on what can be done with an app, rather than what needs to be done for real learning. Significant effort has gone into Pleco‘s iOS handwriting recognition and OCR function, but neither of these teaches writing.īefore I go into my reviews of the handful of Chinese writing apps I found, I should first pose a question: what should an app that teaches Chinese characters do? This is a question that at times seems neglected by app creators.

It’s not that they haven’t done anything, it’s just that no major player with a lot of resources has put a lot of effort into creating a superior app just for teaching writing. The only problem is that they haven’t yet. Now that the iPad has been out for a year, developers have had some time to dig into iOS and create some cool apps for learning to write Chinese characters. One of the reasons I rushed to get an iPad for my own company is that the iPad is the leading tablet computer device, and tablet computers, with their relatively large touch-driven screens, seem uniquely poised to offer a great learning experience for a new generation of learners.

Chinese strokes order app