Help writing Chinese Characters
krobles
July 17, 2008, 10:00 PM posted in General DiscussionHi Everybody! 大家好！
Chinese Pod is an awesome service. Unfortunately, they don't provide much help in the learning how to write characters area. How do you practice Chinese characters? Do you use any service, or do you have a home-made way? Thank you for your help!
KEVIN 凯文
hajaralkhaled
July 18, 2008, 11:33 AMI think as soon as you're familiar with the basic stroke order rules, it's not difficult to wrap your head around the writing system. Just get enough practice to increase fluency (and it will be easier to remember the components the characters consist of).
A fellow CP user, zhanglihua, has recently created a blog helping with the memorisation of the characters and the stroke order. There are fabulous CP-Groups as well that take a systematic approach to learning the hanzi.
kangleilei
November 05, 2008, 05:40 PMI don't understand why it's so hard to find a grid for writing Hanzi in online (to print up at home). Chinesepod should have that as a resource.
sebire
November 05, 2008, 05:45 PMCan't be hard to make one using a few lines in Word or something.
missgoldfish
July 18, 2008, 06:57 AMHi Kevin! Do you mean practicing how to write it, or are you asking about how you know the stroke order of each character?? For the former, I myself have one of those child-books with a bunch of squares in them like a grid, especially for the use of practicing characters =D!
As for the latter, I think there are general rules to follow. For instance, horizontal lines are written from the left to right. The left-hand side is usually written first unless it's something like 这, in which case you write the part on top of the "boat" first, and then you write the little line on the left followed by the stroke down and to the right (under the first component). I guess that may be a bit confusing...
Also, in cases where there are 'squares', I think whatever is needed to be written inside/through the square must be done before the square is closed.
...Does this make sense at all? I'm just going off my own knowledge though, which makes me nervous to recommend this advice (lol). Maybe if we get to compile some concrete rules it would be a great help to a lot of people