How to write Chinese Characters

[linguaholic]

How to write Chinese Characters

Please be aware that is crucial how you write Chinese characters. There are several rules when it comes to writing Chinese characters and it is very important that you stick to those rules. You probably ask yourself: Why is the stroke oder important?

First of all, knowing the stroke order of chinese characters will enable you to recognize characters written by native speakers. Almost all of them learn the stroke order of characters in school and they usually stick to those rules. When writing, Chinese people often write extremely fast, therefore the characters look very blurry / fuzzy. As most of the people try to use the same stroke order, the blurry / fuzzy image of a certain character looks always more or less the same. Consequently, if you write characters randomly without sticking to the correct stroke order, the characters will not only be blurry / fuzzy but also unrecognizable for most of the people.

Secondly, if you stick to the correct stroke order, it will help you to improve your writing speed (sooner or later you will get used to the few rules and when seeing a character (even a new one), you will immediately know where to begin and where to end the character).

I could name some more advantages but I guess you already realised the importance of correct stroke order!

So, what are the rules then? Well, here you go:

http://www.zhongwen.com/shufa/

[eppie]

Yes this is true.  When I was just starting to learn how to write numbers 1 t0 10 in Chinese, I thought that it's enough to just copy the characters as you would copy a drawing.  But when my husband saw the way I wrote he laughed and told me that I was doing it wrong.    By the way, thank you for sharing the link (bookmarked).

[pandandesign]

At first, Chinese was very difficult to write because I would have to write the characters or stroke in the order they're written. I would learn the hard way to write from left to right, bottom to up, which that was how learned to write in Chinese. You've got to have some sort of rules to guide you to write the strokes because there are a lot of Chinese characters.

[JohnSword]

If you're looking to explore your artistic side while learning how to write Chinese characters, then I highly recommend taking up Chinese calligraphy.

As the name implies, Chinese calligraphy or 書法, helps students write better while following the rules of writing Chinese characters.