Free Chinese dictation practice (听写)

Hear a word, write it, and see how you did right away. Type or handwrite, with stroke order for every character. No account needed.

Why dictation works better than rereading

Dictation (听写) means hearing a word and writing the characters from memory. It is how Chinese classes have always tested vocabulary, and it survives because it is genuinely hard in a useful way: it forces recall rather than recognition.

That distinction matters more than most students realise. Looking at a character list and thinking "yes, I know that one" is recognition, and it feels like learning while doing very little. Being given only the sound and having to produce the character is recall — and recall is what an exam actually asks for. Ten focused minutes of writing words you keep missing beats an hour of rereading the list.

Reading a character and writing it are different skills

Plenty of students can read a character fluently and still stall when asked to write it. The information needed to recognise a shape is far less than the information needed to reproduce it: the components, their order, their proportions. This is why students who only ever read end up losing marks on written quizzes — and why practising the writing directly is the fix.

How the practice works

Hear it, write it, get checked

A word is played aloud. You write what you heard and it is checked immediately, so a mistake gets corrected while you still remember what you were thinking — instead of two days later when the quiz comes back.

Type or handwrite

Type your answer, or handwrite it and trace along with the stroke order for each character. Stroke order is not fussiness: writing components in a consistent order is what makes characters stick, and it is what makes your handwriting legible to a teacher.

Your own word list

Paste the list from class and practise precisely what you will be tested on. The study guide fills in pinyin, meanings and example sentences for the words you paste, so you are not looking things up in three places at once.

Missed words come back

Words you get wrong resurface more often through flashcards and spaced repetition, until you stop missing them. You can also just run the same list again as many times as you like — there is no algorithm forcing you to wait.

A routine for a quiz on Monday

• Sunday night is too late to start, but not too late to matter. Paste the list, run it once, and note which words you miss.
• Rerun only the ones you missed. Words you already know need no practice; time spent on them is time wasted.
• Handwrite the worst five. If a character will not stick, trace it with stroke order a few times rather than typing it.
• Run the full list one last time. If you can clear it cold, you are ready.
• Ten minutes a day beats an hour on Sunday. Spacing the same total time across days produces far more durable memory.

Related practice

Preparing for a proficiency test? See STAMP test practice for Chinese or IB Chinese reading and listening practice.

Example sentences come from Tatoeba (CC-BY), stroke order from Hanzi Writer, and dictionary data from CC-CEDICT.