Each Chinese character is a word with its own meaning. There are thousands of such characters and writing (or rather drawing) them can be difficult. To make matters worse, there characters must be drawn in the correct stroke order. In other words the lines and curves that make up the character must be drawn in a certain sequence..



Unlike in English where people are allowed to have their own way of doing things when it comes to handwriting, the Chinese are extremely serious when it comes to following the stroke order of a certain Chinese character. If you do not follow the right order it is considered to be an incorrect interpretation of how the character was supposed to appear.

Some characters have simple stroke sequence requiring less than four three or four strokes, while some of the more difficult ones can have more than of twenty different strokes, all of which need to be remembered for the stroke order in which they come in. Even if one stroke is wrong it is considered to be written wrong.

Most Chinese characters have two or more meanings which can make learning Chinese very difficult. However it can be satisfying once you have mastered it.

Many Asian characters such as the Japanese and Korean characters are based on the Chinese characters. While the Japanese and Korean governments have introduced new character set to replace the Chinese set, you can still find traces of Chinese characters in everyday use and especially in historical monuments.

In English, several characters (alphabets) make up a word. In Chinese each character is a word that can have several meanings. Therefore to fully comprehend the meaning of a statement we need to look at the entire sentence and understand the context that the character is written to get the meaning.