Characters

Chinese, which is formed of characters, is among the world's oldest written languages. Generally speaking, each character stands for a meaningful syllable. The total number of Chinese characters is estimated at more than 50,000 of which only 5, 000 -8,000 are in common use. Of these merely 3,000 are used for everyday purposes.

The Chinese characters in use today developed from the pictographs cut on oracle bones dating from over 3,000 years ago and the pictographs found on ancient bronze vessels dating a little later.

The following is a Shang Dynasty inscription cut on an animal shoulder bone. It asks if there will be any calamities, notes the spirits' affirmative answer, and reports later verification that calamities did indeed occur.

Written on Bamboo and Silk (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962).

       Pictographic

Let's look at the following pictures, they may give you some ideas of how some of Chinese characters are developed from pictographs.

Strokes

In the course of their history of development, Chinese characters evolved from pictographs into characters formed by strokes, with their structures very much simpler. The system of strokes includes eight basic forms: "Dian", a simple dot, "Heng", a horizontal stroke, from the left to the right, "Shu", a vertical stroke, from the top to the bottom. "Gou", a hook attached to other strokes, "Ti", a diagonal stroke, rising from the left to the right, "Pie" a diagonal stroke, falling from right to left, "Duan Pie" a short diagonal stroke, falling from right to left, and "Na" a horizontal stroke, falling from left to right. The following are some of the examples.

Stroke-order
Writing characters in the correct order is very important. The basic rules are: from the top to the bottom and from the Left to the right. Let's see how the Chinese characters "Beijing" is written.

Reference: http://ww.ocrat.com/

Forms of Chinese characters

Chinese characters come in two forms: complex (used in Hong Kong and Taiwan) and simplified (used in mainland China). The simplification of Chinese characters is a reform aimed at reduction of the number of the characters (mainly through the elimination of the complex variants) and reduction of the number of the strokes of which a complex character is composed (by the popularization of the simplified characters). This simplification conforms entirely to the general tendency of development of the Chinese characters towards greater simplicity. The simplified forms, as compared with their complex equivalents, are much easier to learn, to memorize, to read and to write.

To have a picture of complex and simplified words, please visit:
http://www.advancelit.com/albase/characters.htm

To learn the Chinese words, please visit:
http://logos.uoregon.edu/explore/orthography/chinese.html

To learn something about the evolution of Chinese Characters, please visit:
http://www.humboldt.edu/~cllc/evolutn.htm

To learn how to write Chinese characters, please visit:
http://ww.ocrat.com/