We have to start by saying the Chinese writing system is one of the most beautiful and ancient writing systems in the world.
We are not trying to make things complicated but there are two forms of writing in existence today. The “traditional” characters are still used in most Chinese-speaking countries and regions outside mainland China, for example HongKong and Taiwan. Mainland China predominantly uses “simplified” characters and Practical Mandarin only teach Simplified Chinese in our courses.
The writing of Chinese characters follows strict rules. The first thing to understand is that characters are made up of set strokes (ie the line patterns). These strokes are always written in the same way. The graph above is the 12 basic strokes you need to write any beautiful characters.
Next you need to understand Stroke Order, the order in which you write the strokes is important. Some general rules for your practice:
1 Write top to bottom
2 Write left to right
3.Horizontal before vertical
4 Outside before inside, then bottom closing
As a kid growing up in China, we were taught in very strict rules to write the characters, and each time learning a new character, our teacher would ask us to call out the name of the stroke, to be sure of our writing order. However, what we discover now is the stroke orders are not massively important for computer language. If you change your keyword to Chinese handwriting, you can write the characters with the correct stroke order, or a slightly different stroke order, most of the time, the word you want could be shown. So it’s really ok to follow the four basic rules above, and get on with writing the characters.
The last note is you will need some squares to practice with, you can buy or make squared paper for this purpose. Your characters will look more beautiful if they are evenly spaced, fit into equal-sized saures, and look symmetrical.
Oh, one last note, you don’t need to space in every single character or words in written Chinese. Let me give you an example, “I like learning Chinese language” = 我喜欢学习中文。That’s how it looks like.
You can try that on your phone or computer now, oh, you don’t know how? Let me give you instructions in the next post.
