Introducing Hanzi Grids - A tool for creating printable worksheets for handwriting practice

[imron]

Hope you enjoy the extra fonts and backgrounds.

[LSamuel]

Thanks for making this tool! I just registered recently and also paid the 10$ to use all the options. I'm happy to finally have found a good way to practice my handwriting, which used to be the one thing I paid too little attention.

 

Also recommended this to a friend, who's taking the same Chinese classes as I.

[imron]

Glad to hear you find it useful.  Check out my signature for other useful Chinese learning tools.

[trifle]

Is hanzigrids.com down for maintenance?  I'm the US -- can't seem to connect using Safari or Firefox.  I've liked generating practice sheets with it.  

[imron]

Nope.  It's up an running fine.  What error message are you getting?

[Shelley]

I have small problem when printing grids. It prints a whole sheet of blank squares and then also the printer chucks out a blank sheet.

 

I have looked at things from my end and it all seem ok. Hanzi Grids says there is 4 pages when actually there are only 3. I have double checked I haven't put anything on page 4.

 

I am using landscape mode, a4 paper size.

 

Its not a huge problem but a bit annoying.

[imron]

Can you send me a copy of the text and a screen shot of your configuration and I'll look in to it.

[Shelley]

Yes, when you say a copy of the text do you mean the PDF?

[Shelley]

screen grab.

[Shelley]

Grab of PDF

[imron]

By the text, I just meant everything in the 'content' field, but from the screenshot I can see the problem - it looks like you have a couple of empty lines at the end of your text and so Hanzi Grids is including those lines in the worksheets too.

 

There are 2 solutions to this, 1) you can manually delete the empty lines at the end of the text or 2) you can click the 'ignore whitespace' checkbox and Hanzi Grids will ignore empty lines (and any other spaces in the text, but there are no others in your text so in this case it will just be ignoring the empty lines at the end).

[Shelley]

Oh I see, I understand, as soon as I backspaced the page number changed from 4 to 3. Will remember the ignore white space box too if I have more problems.

 

Thank you

[Lorealing]

Hi!

I've just discovered Hanzi Grids. I have been looking for a similar tool to improve my notes, but I was thinking about adding pinyin, translation and stroke order. Would you think about adding an optional row for pinyin and translation? (likely with pc text entrance rather than just the gap). The stroke order could be easily made by hand, but it would look better if printed. Are you considering this option?

Finally, is that possible to change the colour of the characters separately with the payment subscription? I use a different colour for every HSK level and would like to put characters from different levels in the same page if possible.

 

Great job, thanks for all and excuse my rusty english ;)

 

PD. Would you consider developing the tool a little bit more to produce printable flashcards?

[imron]

Thanks for your feedback.  There are many features I would like to add, and all the ones you've mentioned are ones I have thought about, however at this point in time I'm busy with a number of other projects and so it will likely be some time before I can add them.

 

Regarding colours, it's currently not possible to change them separately.  The colour can be changed, but only for the entire worksheet (though you can set the text, foreground grid and background grid colours separately).

 

By printed flashcards, what specifically would you like to see?

[Lorealing]

Nowadays I'm doing my flashcards using word. This is an example:

It takes ages to duplicate information and make coincide back and frot (especially when you are just introducing pinyin and not pinyin and meaning as in the example). And if you don't like the size or the look when you're finished it's like redoing the whole work.

I liked the makeplayingcards web page tool because it allows you to put the information of every single flashcard and see its single back and front, even adding different images to every single one.

I would really like to have a software to introduce back and front of flashcard one, then flashcard two... and in the end decide the size and generate a pdf with all the flashcards to be printed.

Sounds good in my head, but I know that programming it wouldn't be easy. Just throwing ideas...

[imron]

I'll have a think about it, but it will be a while before I get any real time to look at it.  Thanks for the ideas though :-)

[Shelley]

@Lorealing are you aware of Anki and or Pleco?

 

Pleco is brilliant dictionary with a flashcard addon see here  http://www.pleco.com

 

Anki is a dedicated flashcard program for many things but you can make flashcards for Chinese with it and there are some ready made Chinese decks.

 

I prefer Pleco for many reasons but mostly because it is really easy to make flashcards and it has lot of other good and useful features, and is designed for Chinese.

 

I use Pleco and Hanzi Grids, they are both very good.

[Lorealing]

@Shelley I use pleco app as a dictionary in my phone, but this tools have two problems from my point of view:

- I'm an Spanish speaker... Using a chinese-english tool means a need of an english-spanish dictionary sometimes.

- I do prefer to work with paper flashcards instead of an app. (I still offer some resistance to the digital era... )

 

Thank you for your help ;)

[Shelley]

Glad you are happy with your cards, hadn't realised you were a Spanish speaker, lots of problems going through English to get to Spanish

[dailaoshi]

Dear all,

 

New user here. Great site. 

 

I've been using Hanzi Grid for some time now. But what happened to their website? I just get a blank page now. No 404. Nothing. 

 

Hope they're still around.