Chinese lesson 1.2: Chinese writing

The unit of Chinese character, or sinogram, is the line. In Chinese writing, there are eight basic strokes:

These eight simple lines can have many variations, 29 in all, which are called complex stroke.

With these eight basic lines and their variants, we can write 214 basic Chinese characters called radical. Some radicals are words that are used as 马 mǎ (horse), others are never found alone as the radical of water: 氵 but only with other radicals. Combining those radicals, you can create an infinite number of Chinese characters. Learning the radicals may seem unnecessary and difficult for the beginner, but you will remember Chinese characters much more easily in the future.

Chinese character writing rules

A Chinese character is written in an imaginary square. If the character is composed of several radical, which is almost always the case, it is not necessary that the radicals are too far from each other but all falling in the same square, otherwise they will be considered as different characters. Example: 好 character is composed of two radicals. If we do not write them both in the same imaginary square, it well be: 女子.

When you learn to write a Chinese character, it is imperative to respect the decomposition ie the stroke order and direction of each stroke.

There are seven basic rules of writing Chinese. You can view this page Chinese writing rules. You should notice that the vertical lines are still up and down and horizontal lines from left to right.

Learn to write Chinese

We learn to write Chinese on simple printer sheet. A ballpoint pen is very suitable for training. Writing lines are made in grids provided for this purpose. Chine-culture.com site offers a tool for generating write grids to practice. In this online Chinese course, you can download and print the writing grids of each lesson.

Initially, however, it is preferable to use grids with models.
Download writing grids and example of grid by clicking here

你 Nǐ : you
Stroke order:

Example grid:

好 hǎo : good, well
Stroke order:

他 tā : he, him
Stroke order:

吗 ma : simple interrogative particle
Stroke order:

呢 ne : interrogative particle (used to return a question that the speaker has just been asked. Example Nǐ ne ? And you ?)
Stroke order:

不 bù : negation, no
Stroke order:

我 wǒ : I, me
Stroke order:

很 hěn : very
Stroke order:

再 zài : (again)
Stroke order:

见 jiàn : (see)
Stroke order:

The chinese character of thank you xièxie 谢谢, it will be discussed in a later lesson.

The vocabulary of the lesson is as follows:

我 wǒ: I, me

你 nǐ: you

他 tā: he, him

好 hǎo: good, well

你好 nǐhǎo: hello

很 hěn: very

吗 ma: simple interrogative particle

呢 ne: interrogative particle (used to return a question that the speaker has just been asked. Example Nǐ ne ? And you ?)

xièxie : thank you

不 bù : negation, no

再见 zàijiàn : goodbye

Remember to practice the vocabulary in writing, you made ​​a list of vocabulary in Chinese characters only then try to find the pinyin and translation. Must be repeated until no fault. Then you do the same exercise but in the opposite direction, ie by writing the list in translation and finding the characters and pinyin.

You must understand vocabulary before moving on to the next step !

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