xingshaocheng/hanzi-writer

Hanzi Writer is a free, open-source tool that helps people learn to write Chinese characters. It shows animated demonstrations of the correct stroke order for each character and includes interactive practice quizzes where learners can try drawing the strokes themselves. It works with both simplified and traditional Chinese characters, which covers the two main writing systems used across Chinese-speaking regions. The project is a JavaScript library, meaning it is a piece of code that web developers can plug into their own websites or apps. When a user wants to learn a character, the tool can animate exactly how each stroke should be drawn and in what order. It also turns the process into a quiz, letting the user attempt to draw the character themselves while the system checks whether they are doing it correctly. The underlying data for each character, including the precise shape and order of the strokes, comes from an open-source project called Make Me A Hanzi, which originally extracted this information from fonts created by a Taiwanese company called Arphic Technology. This tool would be useful for anyone building language-learning apps, educational websites, or online tools for students of Chinese. For example, a startup creating a Mandarin learning app could use this to add an interactive writing practice feature without having to build the stroke-order logic from scratch. A teacher creating a class website could also embed it so students can practice writing assigned characters at home. It is primarily aimed at developers who want to add Chinese character writing practice to their digital products. The project is released under an MIT license, which means it is free to use and modify. The character data itself carries a separate but similarly permissive license from Arphic Technology.