Chinese Characters & Stroke Order

Chinese characters are like pictures. Each picture represents a word. In practice a working knowledge of two thousand characters is enough for daily application. Chinese characters can be very difficult to write (or draw). The stroke order or the sequence that the lines and curves that make up a character are drawn must be executed correctly. Any other way and the word is invalid..

In the English language, there is a lot of leeway when it comes to writing a character. For example with the character t it does not really matter whether you draw the horizontal stroke or the vertical stroke first. The end result is still a t. However in Chinese, writing a word with an incorrect stoke order is wrong and sometimes can end up meaning something else.

Simple Chinese characters have few strokes. However complex characters can have upward of twenty different strokes. The difficulty comes with stroke sequence. They must be written in the same manner or the word can be considered wrong.

It is common for a single Chinese character (or word) to have more than one meaning. This makes it more difficult to learn but can also be rewarding when you master it.

Chinese characters have deep roots in other Asian cultures as well and their characters are even used, for example, as a part of the Japanese language. The Japanese call the characters Kanji, the main difference between the two is that that some of the Chinese characters' meanings have been changed in the Japanese's rendition of them. Other than that they are usually the same as far as looks is concerned.

One character in the English Language, do not mean much. In the Chinese Language however one Chinese character usually means one word and sometimes several. You can easily string together a few of them to make a sentence. Since one Chinese character can have several meanings, a reader can often only know the meaning by understanding the context which the characters are written.