Character Building
Should Chinese Learners Still Practice Handwriting?
Image by: Vincent Knoop
By Hanyu Tales (16th May 2025)
Nowadays, most text is entered via a digital keyboard and handwriting is becoming a lost art. This has led to debates about the utility of Chinese students learning to handwrite Hanzi. Given the huge time investment required to handwrite in Chinese at a high level, it is worth considering whether or not is a good investment of your study time. In this article, we will look at the research on learning Chinese with and without handwriting, before offering a simple criteria that will help you decide if handwriting is for you.
Benefits of Handwriting
Learning to handwrite Chinese characters is not easy, but for many teachers it is considered a crucial part of the language, meaning some recommend that it is taught from the very beginning of the study of Chinese language. For example, research on young Chinese children learning to write found: 
While these studies were both on Chinese children, some research on non-Chinese adults also finds positives associated with handwriting, as shown in this study:
“Both sensitivity to Chinese character structure and understanding of the function of semantic radicals are crucial to children’s early spelling abilities.”
Meanwhile, another study on Chinese children found that “air-writing and handwriting elicited a larger training effect than reading or visual processing”. Therefore, it is fair to assume that the act of handwriting carries some benefits that cannot be accessed by simply typing on a keyboard. Image by: Feng Zou
“Improvement in handwriting quality played a significant role in predicting reading gains after controlling for prior knowledge.”
Therefore, improving your handwriting is likely to improve your reading too. If you scan through language-learning posts, you will likely find many anecdotal claims supporting this notion, with learners finding that the hours spent focusing on the individual elements of each character help greatly with retention. Drawbacks of Handwriting
While handwriting may help you remember characters, even the biggest advocate of handwriting would agree that handwriting practice is extremely time-consuming. In fact, according to this paper:
“CFL instructors report allocating at least one third of their course time to handwriting practice”
For learners with limited time following a minimalist approach, a third of study time is a significant chunk. Furthermore, the same paper also found that: “Students scored significantly lower on word recognition tasks after spending 34.69% of their practice time on handwriting exercises, mimicking the structure of a traditional CFL course.”
This calls into question anecdotal claims about how handwriting helps with retention, as spending that time on reading may actually lead to greater benefits than spending hours memorizing stroke-order. In fact, this study showed that learning strokes did not lead to significant improvements in remembering the meaning of Chinese characters. The lack of significant benefits to accompany the significant time investment that takes time away from practicing more important skills is likely why journal articles like Joseph R. Allen’s “Why Learning To Write Chinese Is a Waste of Time” exist. Advantages of Typing
The alternative to handwriting is of course typing. A this study on 30 adult Chinese learners from 13 different nations found that writing performance was better when typing than when handwriting. While some may say this is obvious, it offers a reminder that if you want to heighten your digital writing skills as quickly as possible, handwriting may slow you down. One could argue this applies to speaking skills too, as by focusing on handwriting instead of typing, less time is spent using pinyin, a system based on Chinese pronunciation. This is why pinyin and typing are often considered two of the most crucial parts of Chinese learning, as this paper states: 
“Pinyin and technical skills should be introduced as early as possible for them to appreciate the benefits of computer-mediated Chinese text input and subsequently, composition writing”
Focusing on pinyin-based typing is also supported in this journal article by Qi Zhang and Ge Min, as they not only found that pre-intermediate Chinese foreign language learners performed better when assisted by pinyin than by pen-and-paper, but that they also preferred it, especially when composing lengthy texts. This paper also discusses students preference for typing over handwriting, noting the students’ appreciation for the convenience and assistance which using a word processor offers, concluding that: “word-processors are suggested as the preferred writing medium for beginning learners of CFL”. Image by: Christina Morillo
Disadvantages of Typing
Convenience and assistance, however, can also be problematic, as relying on features like spell-checking may lead to less focus—this has been shown in neuroscience research:
“Handwriting activates a broader network of brain regions involved in motor, sensory, and cognitive processing. Typing engages fewer neural circuits, resulting in more passive cognitive engagement.”
It is therefore possible that the reason students prefer typing is partly due to it being easier and requiring less focus. Furthermore, the anecdotal claims that students remember characters better after handwriting them resurfaces here, suggesting the time investment may be justified in some cases. Finally, while not of vital importance, it is worth noting that for advanced learners, there is always an assumption that one can handwrite in Chinese, as this survey found that people regarded Chinese writing as the “handwriting of Chinese characters”, not typing. Therefore, if your sole reason for learning Chinese is to impress others, you might need to pick up a pen before calling yourself a master. So Should You Learn to Handwrite?
The reality is that learning to handwrite is not essential. Even among native speakers, the digital age has led to “a deteriorating of penmanship” that is likely to only become more pronounced. Yet, this does not make handwriting a complete waste of time, and it certainly has some benefits, despite the huge number of hours needed to grasp it. Overall, we believe there are two requirements that must be met for handwriting to be worth your time:
- Enjoyment: As handwriting is increasingly non-essential (unless it is part of the course you are enrolled in) and requires a lot of time, it is not worth forcing yourself to do unless you truly enjoy it.
- Time: Most learners want to improve their comprehension and communication skills, so before dedicating hours to handwriting, make sure you have enough time to focus on the more essential skills of listening, reading, speaking, and typing.