EditWriting in Chinese
Learning to read and write Chinese characters will probably be your largest obstacle in this course. Since Chinese has no alphabet with reusable letters, there is no way around lots of writing practice and rote memorization. Although pinyin is valuable for learning the pronunciation of characters, the number of homonyms in the Chinese language would make a total replacement of characters impractical.
While difficult and time consuming, learning Chinese characters can be an enjoyable and rewarding experience that provides a window into Chinese culture. The writing system has been in continuous use for over 3000 years, with the characters essentially unchanged since the 7th century. There is a story in every character.
Additionally, because of the difficulty, people tend to be that much more impressed by foreigners who take it upon themselves to learn Chinese characters.
Edit Stroke Order
Stroke order (simplified Chinese: 笔顺; traditional Chinese: 筆順; pinyin: bǐshùn; Japanese: 筆順 hitsujun or 書き順 kaki-jun; Korean: 필순 筆順 "pilsun" or 획순 畫順 "hoeksun") refers to the correct order in which the strokes of a Chinese character are written. A stroke is a movement of a writing instrument. Chinese characters are used in various forms in the modern Chinese, Japanese, and in Korean. They are known as hanzi in Chinese, kanji in Japanese, and hanja in Korean languages. While these languages all utilize a common set of characters, the rules governing stroke order may differ in each language.
The number of strokes per character for most characters is between one and thirty, but the number of strokes in some obscure characters can reach as many as seventy. As such, official stroke order was devised to help speed, fluidity, and accuracy in composition. In the twentieth century, simplification of Chinese characters took place in mainland China, greatly reducing the number of strokes in some characters, and a similar but more moderate simplification also took place in Japan. The basic rules of stroke order within each language, however, remained the same.
The rules for stroke order evolved to facilitate vertical writing, to maximize ease of writing and reading, to aid in producing uniform characters, and – since a person who has learned the rules can infer the stroke order of most characters – to ease the process of learning to write. They were also influenced by the highly cursive Grass Script style of calligraphy.
Because writing characters in the normalised stroke order can greatly facilitate learning and memorization, children are required to learn and use correct stroke order in school; adults, however, may ignore or forget the normalised stroke order for certain characters, or develop idiosyncratic ways of writing. While this is rarely a problem in day-to-day writing, in calligraphy, stroke order is vital; incorrectly ordered or written strokes can produce a visually unappealing or, occasionally, incorrect character, particularly in styles such as Grass Script, in which individual strokes are often combined in fluid motions without lifting the brush from the paper. Also, the accuracy of handwriting recognition software may be reduced when entering strokes out of order.