Learn How to Write Chinese Characters

Chinese characters are easy to understand once you break it down into components. There are three main groups in which Chinese characters are formed. 

Chinese characters in group one are very easy to understand. For example, the Chinese character for the sun is written as日. The original Chinese character was written as a circle with a dot in the middle and 7 radiating strokes to represent the rays. This is how ancient Chinese saw the sun with its sunspots. To this day, this is how the sun is depicted in children’s art. Chinese people love to square things because it is easier than to draw a perfect circle. To differentiate the moon from the sun, the crescent moon is used instead. After squaring it, the pictograph became the Chinese character月. The two horizontal lines represent the clouds floating across it in the original pictogram. The Chinese character for man is nothing more than a figure stick with his head and arms cut off for simplification to become人. Because of its fundamental meaning, most became radicals on which more complex characters are built upon. For example, the Chinese character “big” 大is a man with outstretched arms represented by the horizontal stroke. As you can now infer, the Chinese character for “small” is a man with its arms and legs squeezed closely to the body: 小.

Chinese characters in the second group are actually quite funny. For example, the Chinese character for river is川which has been straightened and stylized to give it some aesthetic form. If you can squeeze the river, what you get is water. Hence the Chinese character for water looks something like >|< which is then styled into水. This root radical is combined with other characters to mean all things that are related to water or liquids. Hence Chinese characters such as “float”, “sink”, “deep”, “shallow”, “oil”, “wet” etc all have the liquid attributes--浮, 沉, 深, 潜, 油and 湿. Ancient China was an agricultural based society. Therefore to cultivate the fields, manpower was needed. Hence a woman producing sons is good and so the character for good is a woman(女) and her son（子）- 好!

Chinese characters in group three are related to sound. In English we have the words for bark, meow, bleat, chirp etc. More logical in Chinese, the creature is appended to the mouth radical. Thus we have 吠, 喵, 咩and鸣respectively.

Chinese characters are actually very easy to recognize and write once you break it down. Can you guess what the modern Chinese characters for the pictograms in the picture?