Chinese Character Grid

Squares with guides inside them

A full page of square cells, each carrying faint dashed guides that show a character's proportions. Twenty-two millimetres a side by default. Hide the outer borders if you want a cleaner sheet.

The three grids, and what each is for

Tian Zi Ge (田字格) draws a simple cross — one vertical and one horizontal midline. The name is the character 田, which is exactly what the cell looks like. The standard grid, and what Chinese primary schools use.

Mi Zi Ge (米字格) adds both diagonals on top of that cross, giving eight rays from the centre. Eight reference points instead of four, so any stroke running at an angle has something to align against, which is precisely what a beginner needs while they still cannot judge by eye where a diagonal ought to fall inside the square.

Hui Gong Ge (回宫格) drops the cross entirely and draws an inner box instead. That box marks where the body of the character should sit, and it is used for centring rather than for stroke placement.

Why characters need a grid at all

Because a Chinese character is not written along a line. It occupies a square. Every character fills the same square, whether it has two strokes or twenty-four.

That is the hard part for anyone arriving from an alphabet. 一 and 麟 take identical space on the page, so a character of many strokes has to be written compactly while one of two strokes has to be spread out to fill its square — and the guides are what turn that judgement from instinct into something a learner can actually see.

Choosing a cell size

Bigger than you think. Complex characters written small collapse into scribble, and a learner who cannot see their own errors cannot correct them.

Start large enough that a twenty-stroke character is comfortable, then come down as the shapes settle. Coming down is the point — real writing is small, and a learner who only ever practises at 30 mm has not finished.

Practising well

Stroke order matters, and it is not decorative. It affects the shape of the finished character, it is what makes handwriting legible at speed, and it is how a dictionary lookup by stroke count works. Learn it per character rather than guessing.

Broadly: top before bottom, left before right, horizontal before the vertical that crosses it, outside before inside. The box closes last.

A handful of repetitions each, not forty. Attention fades, and a page of increasingly careless copies teaches carelessness.

Also useful for

Japanese kanji, which occupy their squares the same way. Korean hanja. Brush calligraphy, where the guides matter more rather than less.

Print at 100% or the cells are not the size you asked for.