Not an animation you watch — strokes you place yourself, in order, on 2,142 real kanji. Then trace them with your finger.
The finished character is there. What is missing is the order it was written in.
Right ones lock in black, wrong ones flash and cost you. No recognition, no guessing at your handwriting.
Draw over each stroke with a finger or mouse. Direction counts — starting at the wrong end does not pass.
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Create free account Log inWhich kanji you get. N5 are the simplest and shortest.
Long characters are a different skill from short ones — they need the ordering rules rather than memory.
Total XP across every game on the site — kanji, kana, grammar, vocabulary, the lot.
A sample of N5 kanji with the opening stroke marked. Notice how often it is the top-left horizontal — that is the first rule doing most of the work.
Stroke order is not decoration. It is what makes a character come out balanced, what makes cursive legible, and — most practically for a learner in 2026 — what makes handwriting input work. If you cannot read a kanji you meet in the wild, drawing it into a dictionary is the fastest way to look it up, and that recognition is built entirely around expected stroke order. Get the order wrong and the lookup fails on a character you drew perfectly.
The default, and it settles most characters on its own. 三 is written top line, middle line, bottom line. 川 is left, middle, right.
Where strokes cross, the horizontal comes first. 十 is the horizontal then the vertical. This one rule resolves a very large share of ambiguous cases.
For a character in a box, the outside goes first — but the bottom line that closes it comes last, after the contents. 国 is left side, top and right, then the inside, then the bottom. Writing the box completely before the contents is the single most common learner error.
In symmetrical shapes the middle comes first, then left, then right. 小 is the centre hook, then the left dot, then the right.
A vertical stroke running through the whole character is written at the end. 中 is the box, then the vertical through it.
These five cover the overwhelming majority. The remainder are exceptions worth meeting one at a time, which is exactly what a drill is for — and why this game shows you every stroke of a character rather than a single animation you nod at and forget.
Handwriting recognition judges how neat you are. It fails good learners with shaky hands and passes bad ones with tidy wrong order. Here the strokes are given and the only question is the sequence, so the thing being graded is the thing being taught. Trace mode adds the hand movement afterwards, checking direction and path rather than beauty.
Less, but not none. The moment you meet a kanji you cannot read, handwriting input is the fastest lookup — and it is built around expected stroke order. It also makes characters come out proportioned, because the rules exist to keep the hand moving in a way that balances the shape.
By path and direction, not neatness. Your line has to follow the guide stroke reasonably closely and start at the right end — drawing a correct-looking stroke backwards does not pass, because backwards is exactly the habit that breaks cursive and handwriting input.
2,142 with a JLPT level, split N5 to N1 — the simplest and shortest first. Every one has real stroke-by-stroke data behind it.
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Nothing you just did was saved. An account keeps your score, your streak and — more usefully — a record of which characters and words you personally get wrong, which every game on the site then uses.