Learning Chinese writing may be the hardest part of learning Chinese language. Chinese is not a language of alphabets, so the Chinese writing is not related to  alphabets. Pinyin, the Chinese phonetic alphabets, is only for Chinese pronunciations. For many new Chinese learners, the Chinese characters are more like   pictures and they don't even know where to start the drawing.

The following is the basic knowledge about Chinese characters must know by new beginner Chinese learners.

The Chinese characters are made of strokes.

The Chinese Characters are made of strokes. When you write a Chinese character, you write it stroke by stroke. Some Chinese characters are very simple, containing only a few strokes, others are very complicated, containing more than thirty strokes.

The basic strokes you should know :

The shapes, sizes, curves and  length of strokes can be different due to the different positions in different Chinese characters. 

The following are some variations of the basic strokes :   

Only a small part of Chinese characters are pictographs. Most of Chinese characters are Semantic-phonetic. There is a semantic part (radical) to hint the meaning and a phonetic part to hint the pronunciation. For example,亻means people.

Simplified Chinese characters and traditional Chinese characters

The simplified Chinese characters are used in the mainland of China. The traditional Chinese characters are used in Hongkong,Taiwan and Macao.

Tips for learning Chinese Characters:

Learn the Basic strokes and their variations first.

Then learn and understanding the meaning of  all radicals.

Then Use the strokes build simple Chinese characters.

Use simple Chinese characters and radicals build more Chinese characters.

To learn how you can learn Chinese characters in a funny easy way like playing Chinese character games, please click here for more information.