Mi Zi Ge vs Tian Zi Ge vs Hui Gong Ge: Which Practice Grid When?

By the HanziWise team · Published 2026-09-25 · 3 min read

Chinese has four practice grids in common use, and choosing between them is not a matter of taste — each one trains a different weakness. Here is what each grid actually does, and a stage-by-stage recommendation.

The four grids at a glance

Tian Zi Ge: the placement teacher

The crossed square answers where questions: where a stroke starts, where it ends, where the character's center sits. If you are writing your first few hundred characters, this is your grid — full reasoning in our Tian Zi Ge guide.

Mi Zi Ge: the angle teacher

The name comes from 米 (rice), which the eight-line grid resembles. The two diagonals run at 45°, and that is precisely the angle of the two hardest stroke families: the left-falling 撇 and right-falling 捺.

Try 人 (person): its two strokes should leave the top-center point at roughly mirror-image 45° angles, following the grid's diagonals. In 大 (big) and 木 (tree), the diagonals tell you exactly how far the sweeps should extend — to the lower corners of the grid, no further. Beginners almost always make these strokes too steep (character looks skinny) or too flat (character looks squashed). Mi Zi Ge makes the error visible at a glance.

Hui Gong Ge: the structure teacher

Hui Gong Ge (回宫格, "returning palace grid") puts a dashed inner rectangle inside the square. The idea: the body of a well-written character lives inside the inner box, and only designated long strokes — a final 捺, a long vertical, a sweeping hook — are allowed to break out of it. If your characters tend to balloon or drift, a few weeks in Hui Gong Ge re-teaches compactness. There is also a combined Mi Zi Hui Gong Ge (diagonals + inner box) for learners who want both references at once.

Which grid, at which stage

1. Weeks 1–6: Tian Zi Ge for everything. Learn placement before angles.
2. Weeks 6–12: Mi Zi Ge for characters heavy in 撇/捺 (人, 大, 木, 永); Tian Zi Ge for the rest.
3. Any time your writing sprawls: two weeks of Hui Gong Ge as a corrective.
4. Review and self-testing: plain Fang Ge or blank rows — if the character only looks right with guides, it is not learned yet.

All four grids (plus the combined Mi-Hui variant) are selectable in the Worksheet Generator, so you can print the same characters in different grids and feel the difference yourself. A practical drill: print 永 in Tian Zi Ge and Mi Zi Ge side by side, and notice how the diagonals discipline the 撇 and 捺 that make up most of the character.

Whichever grid you use, the progression that builds real skill is tracing → partial tracing → writing from memory. That method is laid out in our 15-minute daily practice routine.

A five-minute experiment that settles the debate

If you are still unsure which grid fits you, run this test tonight. Print 人, 木 and 永 once in Tian Zi Ge and once in Mi Zi Ge — switching grids takes one click in the generator. Write each character three times per grid, from memory on the third attempt. Then compare: in which grid are your 撇 and 捺 symmetric and correctly angled? Almost every learner answers Mi Zi Ge for angle-heavy characters and Tian Zi Ge for everything else — which is exactly the mixed approach recommended above. Keep the sheets; rerunning the same test a month later is a surprisingly satisfying way to see progress.

Frequently asked questions