These are the 8 basic strokes that make up most of the characters in Chinese writing. I started out by trying to practice these. This got very frustrating because as you can see they are not just straight lines.  This was very very difficult.

My first day of trying to practice Chinese basic brush strokes did not go very well. I am clumsy and it seems impossible to me to get the correct turns of the pen to have thick and thin lines.

At the end of day two I decide to concentrate more on reading Chinese than actually writing it. I hope that as I look at it and study the different characters long enough they will somehow "come to me".  I'm sure this is wishful thinking on my part.

By the second day I am already frustrated with the basic strokes and I decide to try to write a few characters. The first 3 lines are dao which means knife (at least that's what I was trying for). There is also my attempt at da which means large or big and ren for man

I have decided to do this by date now. I started day one on 3/1/01. Now it's day 3, 3/3/01 and I had decided yesterday to concentrate on reading instead of characters, but I realize I can't learn the characters without writing them, so I have decided to keep trying to write them, but not worry as much about how perfect they are and try to get them down enough to recognize the differences in characters and the Chinese name associated with the English name.

As you can see I'm still having trouble getting the correct twist on the pen. The most difficult characters to write are zi for son, shan for mountain and for some reason da for big. Da looks like it would be easyier than some of the others, but it's not. So far I am still excited about learning Chinese, but it's only been 3 days also.

man         knife       strength    mouth     earth        big           female          son           small          mountain                   From the book Beginning Chinese Reader, part one

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