What you will be able to do
- Name the basic strokes and draw each one in its proper direction.
- Apply the ordering rules: top to bottom, left to right, horizontal before vertical, enclose then close.
- Write 人, 口, 女, 好 and 你 in the standard order and with the standard stroke count.
- Tell a component from a radical, and say which component files 你 and 好 in a dictionary.
Chinese words in this text can be activated to show a dictionary gloss.
How a character is built
A Chinese character is not a letter and not a word. It is one syllable with a meaning attached to it, and words are made by putting characters together: xué study plus shēng living gives xuésheng, student. Learning to write therefore starts one level below the character, at the stroke.
Strokes
A stroke is one uninterrupted movement of the pen. There are only a handful of basic shapes.
- héng — a horizontal, always written left to right.
- shù — a vertical, always written top to bottom.
- piě — a fall away to the lower left.
- nà — a fall away to the lower right, pressing wider at the end.
- diǎn — a dot, a short press of the pen.
- tí — a short rise to the upper right.
Two modifications combine with all of these: gōu, a hook flicked at the end of a stroke, and zhé, a turn taken without lifting the pen. A turn does not create a second stroke — the top bar and the right side of are one stroke, a héngzhé.
The pen never runs backwards. Every stroke goes left to right, top to bottom, or outwards from the centre. Nothing is written right to left, and nothing is written bottom to top.
Stroke order
The order is not decoration. It makes the proportions come out right, because each stroke is placed relative to the ones already down. It lets other people read your handwriting. It is what handwriting input on a phone expects. And it fixes the stroke count that a dictionary is indexed by. Six rules cover nearly everything at this level.
- Top to bottom. sān is three horizontals written downwards.
- Left to right. In a character with a left side and a right side, finish the left one completely before starting the right.
- Horizontal before vertical. shí is the horizontal first, then the vertical through it.
- Left-falling before right-falling. comes before .
- Enclose, fill, then close. Write the sides of a box, then whatever goes inside it, and only then the bottom bar.
- Centre before the two sides. In a symmetrical shape, the middle stroke goes down first.
Five characters, one stroke at a time
rén — 2 strokes. The first, from the top down to the left; then the from the same apex down to the right. Rule 4, and nothing else. Keep it apart from rù, where the strokes meet the other way round.
kǒu — 3 strokes. The left vertical; then the top bar and the right side together as one ; then the bottom bar. Three strokes, never four. Rule 5 explains why the bottom comes last, and it matters enormously in a fuller character such as guó, where something has to be written inside the box before it is sealed.
nǚ — 3 strokes. A piědiǎn that falls to the left and turns into a dot; then a crossing it; then the long horizontal sweeping across the middle, last. That final stroke is what ties the character together, which is why it is not written first.
hǎo — 6 strokes. on the left and zǐ on the right, so by rule 2 all three strokes of are finished before is begun. is a , then a , then the horizontal across the middle — the long crossing stroke last again. Notice what happens to when it moves to the left-hand side: its final long horizontal shortens into a rising so that it does not collide with its neighbour. Components do this constantly. They narrow, and their outgoing strokes tuck in.
nǐ — 7 strokes. on the left is two strokes, a then a . on the right is five: , , , , . The vertical hook down the middle of is written before the two strokes flanking it — rule 6.
Component or radical
A component — piānpáng — is any recurring piece a character is assembled from. is assembled from two of them, and . is assembled from and .
A radical — bùshǒu, literally section head — is something narrower. It is the single component under which a dictionary files the character, and every character has exactly one. So every radical is a component, but most components, in most characters, are not the radical. The two words are often used loosely as synonyms; keeping them apart will save you confusion later.
Work the same three characters through:
- is filed under , the person radical, number 9. is there for meaning — this word points at a human being. is there for sound: it was itself the classical word for you, pronounced ěr. A phonetic component like this is a component and not the radical.
- is filed under , radical 38 — even though is a radical too, number 39, and is in fact the radical of and . The same shape is the radical in one character and an ordinary component in another.
- is a complete character in its own right and also radical 30.
Once you can name the radical, a paper dictionary opens up and so does an index that needs no handwriting at all: find the radical, count the strokes left over, and the character is waiting there.
How to work through it
Strokes, then order, then partsread
Read the first two sections and draw each basic stroke five times on paper, saying its name as you go. Getting the direction into your hand now saves undoing a habit later.
Two strokes, then threewriting
人 gives you rule 4 on its own: 撇 then 捺. 口 gives you rules 3 and 5: the left vertical, the top and right side as one turning stroke, then the bottom bar last. Write each ten times and count the strokes aloud — 口 must come out at three, never four.
A component moves leftwriting
Write 女 alone, with its long horizontal last. Then write 好 and watch that same horizontal shorten into a rising 提 to make room for 子. Finish the whole of 女 before you touch 子 — that is rule 2, and it is the rule people break most often.
Seven strokes and one radicalwriting
亻 first, two strokes; then 尔, five, with the vertical hook down the middle before the two strokes on either side. As you write, say which half is the radical and which is the phonetic — 亻 for meaning, 尔 for sound.
The same parts inside words you knowvocabulary
Look at four words you have already learned and find the parts in them: 亻 in 你, 女 and 子 in 好, 子 again under the roof of 学, and 口 sitting inside both characters of 名字. Recognising a part is what turns a wall of characters into a small number of repeating pieces.
Looking a character upread
Take an unfamiliar character, decide which part is the radical, count the strokes that remain, and find it in the radical index. Do it once with 好 and once with 你 to check your method against an answer you already know.