How to Write Chinese Characters

Chinese characters are far more intricate than western letters of the alphabet;  (It is worth noting however that each character contains meaning, whereas a western character is simply part of a word) and the complexity of the characters can be daunting at first.  Take heart that it is definitely not as difficult as it first appears - after just a few lessons everyone in our class was writing the simpler characters with ease!

The first thing to learn is the correct stroke order, a common mistake is to try and draw the characters.  This is a serious error for several reasons:

• You are supposed to be writing not drawing.  How quickly do you think you'd be able to write in English if you drew each letter, sometimes going right to left, up to down, clockwise or otherwise?  If you analyse your handwriting you will see that you always write each letter the same way, without conscious thought; Chinese should be no different to this.
• The characters have an aesthetic beauty of their own, probably because they used to be scribed artistically with a brush.  If you write them in the correct manner your calligraphy will look better, even using a biro.
• There is no alphabet in Chinese so one of the methods of looking up characters in a dictionary is by the number of strokes.  If you are not writing using the correct number of strokes you won't have a hope of using such a dictionary.

Having said all this, I suppose I should explain the rules of writing! 

Strokes

1. Horizontal strokes should always be written from left to right: 一
2. Vertical strokes should be written from top to bottom: 川
3. Boxes are written with three strokes.  Start with the left edge, then one continuous stroke for the top and right edge.  Then close the box with the base: 口
4. "Hook" strokes are made by doing a vertical stroke down and flicking up at the end to form the hook.  eg the centre stroke in: 小

Stroke Order

1. Top to bottom: 三
2. Left to right: 川
3. Upper left corner to lower right corner 石
4. Outside to inside 月
5. When two or more strokes cross, horizontal strokes before vertical ones 十
6. Slanting stroke to the left before a slanting stroke to the right 人
7. Centre stroke before symmetrical wings 小
8. Boxes should only be closed once the strokes inside them have been completed.  So, 田 would be written: left edge, then top and right edges in one stroke, then 十 inside the box and finally the box is closed with the base line.

Stroke Order (advanced)

1. Try and draw the base line last.  So in the case of 王, you would do the top horizontal stroke, then the middle horizontal, then the vertical and finally the base.
2. Vertical strokes which pass through other strokes but do not have strokes either at their top or base should end in a "needle" point.  eg: The vertical stroke in 中 would end in a needle point.  This effect can easily be achieved with a normal biro by reducing the pressure of the pen on the page as the stroke ends.
   The centre vertical for 下 would end normally as it is not "piercing" any lines.  Similarly, the centre vertical of 王 would not end in a needle point as it is bordered at both ends by horizontal strokes.
3. There are always exceptions to these rules if you want to be completely correct!  One example is 女.  Apparently this should not be written with the horizontal stroke first, it should be written : middle downwards stroke, right to left "leg" and finally the third horizontal stroke.  Exceptions generally must be learned on a case by case basis but they are not common so don't worry too much!  (In the case of 女, most computer handwriting recognition systems would still work if you did the horizontal stroke first).

There is a great website that used animated pictures to show how you can write characters correctly at http://www.csulb.edu/~txie/azi/page1.htm.   Another nice site is at http://www.ocrat.com/  although this one uses simplified characters only. 

Aesthetics and Proportions

• Chinese characters are traditionally practised on squared paper, with each character being written in the centre of a square.

An example from a children's learning book

• Characters should be uniformly written with equal spacing between each, again, squared paper can help enforce this.
• Make sure that each component of a character is connected to the whole, it is a common mistake to let radicals drift away from each other so that a single character resembles two or even more individual ones!

Top to bottom, left to right?

A common question is "do Chinese people read top to bottom, right to left or left to right?"  The quick answer is that if characters appear horizontally, they will be read left to right, in exactly the same was as English.  If they are printed vertically, they are read top to bottom, starting from the right-most column and moving left.  This means that vertically printed books will start from the "back", from the point of view of a Westerner, and each column of text will be read until the book finishes at the "front".

Vertical text is common for shop signs and banners in general, and because each character is written inside an imaginary square, it looks just as pleasing to the eye as if it is written horizontally.

One slight exception for horizontal text, is that short phrases will occasionally be written right to left for stylistic or historical effect. When watching period kung-fu films for example, the name on a temple is often written "backwards".

Simplified or Traditional?

For students who are trying to learn Chinese, the teaching method is the same whether they are learning Mandarin or Cantonese.  Modern Mandarin characters are simplified, whereas Cantonese people from Hong Kong will use traditional forms, but the component strokes of both types of characters are the same.  The popular view is that learning Traditional forms first, followed by  Simplified ones is easier in the long run than doing the reverse.  Simplified characters were not introduced until the mid twentieth century, so any Chinese art or literature before then will of course be written in Traditional script.  Even in China today, designers or artists looking for a classical look will tend to use Traditional forms.  By being aware of both, you increase your chances of being able to understand more Chinese.

If you are getting put off by this talk of simplified and traditional characters, don't worry too much!  Many characters are identical in both systems.  For example, take a look at the Level 1 character list on this site and you will see that simplified forms only start appearing within the 8 stroke and above characters.

Punctuation 

Modern Chinese uses punctuation in much the same way as other languages. There are a few minor differences though:

• The period, or fullstop, is not written as . but as 。(a small circle, rather than a dot).
• Commas are the same, but  、is often used when separating items in a list.
• 《 》can used to denote titles or names, eg: 《 title 》for horizontal text.  For vertical text, titles are underlined.  It can be quite helpful to have names punctuated in this manner, especially for beginners! 
• Quotation marks are the same, but sometimes 「」  or 『』 are used instead.
• Question marks have been in use in Chinese writing for many years, although the reason isn't completely clear, for Chinese already has special characters for indicating a question!

For more detail on punctuation, please see this interesting thread. There is also a thread about the question mark in Chinese.

See also:

• Chinese Writing Templates - some templates you can print out to practise writing characters.
• Recommended Chinese fonts to allow you to see the stroke order easily
• Writing Boxes - discussion on how to write the "box" shape.
• Commonly confused characters that look similar
• Handwriting Styles

---

This is a work in progress, so if you have any suggestions, corrections or advice, please contact me or post in the Discussion Forum.