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Your first 20 characters — free printable worksheets
The twenty simplest, most useful shapes in the language — most of them under five strokes, and almost all of them pictures of what they mean.
20 characters · 2 sheets · A4 and US Letter
Why these 20
If you have never written a Chinese character before, start here. Every character on this list is a picture you can still see: a person walking, three mountain peaks, a stream with its current lines. None of them takes more than six strokes, and every one of them turns up inside dozens of more complicated characters later. Learning them is not a warm-up for the real thing — it is the real thing, in its smallest form.
All 20 characters
| 一 | yī | one | 1 strokes |
| 二 | èr | two | 2 strokes |
| 三 | sān | three | 3 strokes |
| 人 | rén | person | 2 strokes |
| 大 | dà | big | 3 strokes |
| 小 | xiǎo | small | 3 strokes |
| 口 | kǒu | mouth | 3 strokes |
| 日 | rì | sun; day | 4 strokes |
| 月 | yuè | moon; month | 4 strokes |
| 山 | shān | mountain | 3 strokes |
| 水 | shuǐ | water | 4 strokes |
| 火 | huǒ | fire | 4 strokes |
| 木 | mù | tree; wood | 4 strokes |
| 土 | tǔ | earth; soil | 3 strokes |
| 上 | shàng | above; up | 3 strokes |
| 下 | xià | below; down | 3 strokes |
| 中 | zhōng | middle; China | 4 strokes |
| 天 | tiān | sky; day | 4 strokes |
| 目 | mù | eye | 5 strokes |
| 力 | lì | strength | 2 strokes |
Questions people ask
Yes, more than it looks. The standard order is what makes handwriting legible at speed and it is how dictionaries and handwriting input are indexed. Getting it right on twenty simple characters now saves undoing a habit on two thousand later.
Learn whichever is used where you are heading: simplified for mainland China and Singapore, traditional for Taiwan, Hong Kong and Macau. Of the twenty characters here, nineteen are identical in both.