First, some basic information on Chinese language is explained using plain English. Chinese characters show up with perfectly horizontal, or vertical lines, or with perfectly curved turns in publications. Handwriting is different of course. It is perfectly fine to write a little off the direction as long as it's not off a lot. Chinese handwritings also have different styles. What's shown here is one common handwriting style similar to the font named Kai-Ti.
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| Four Chinese characters and their pronunciation (top) and meanings (bottom) |
Above the characters are their pronunciation in Chinese, also known as (aka) han yu pin yin. Pin yin comes with one of four tones (or accents), indicated by the short line on the top of one of the letters, usually, vowels. For example, à indicates the 4th tone (falling tone) on letter a. It's like how when we say 'Good!!!'. á indicates the 2nd tone (rising tone). It's like how when saying 'what???'. The 1st tone is neither rising nor falling, and indicated by ā. The last tone (the 3rd one in the order), is a combination of the 4th and the 2nd tones and is indicated with ǎ . In summary, the 4 tones (accents) are indicated by ̄, ́, ̌, and ̀, respectively.
Note that a tone is an essential part of pronunciation for one Chinese character.
When two characters sound the same except the tone, they are considered different pronunciation.
It's common that as many as a dozen or more Chinese characters may have the same pronunciation. Meanwhile, a specific character may have more than one pronunciation. The meaning of the character is different when pronounced differently.
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| Handwriting sequences for two Chinese characters, up and down |
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| Handwriting sequences for two Chinese characters, left and right |
The Chinese handwriting shown here is hand-crafted using postscript language and doesn't depend on any Chinese font resource. The goal is to explain how to write Chinese characters, recognizable and reasonably good, by hand. Hopefully this can enhance your Chinese language learning experience.
Despite the time I spent on preparing them and the fact that Chinese is my native language, the hand-writings shown here can certainly be further improved.
In addition, I have tried my best to make sure all information is correct to the best of my knowledge, including the writing sequence for each character. There could still be errors. We don't live in a perfect world, do we?
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| Four Chinese characters representing the four seasons in a year |
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| Handwriting sequence of the Chinese character spring |
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| Handwriting sequence of the Chinese character summer |
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| Handwriting sequence of the Chinese character autumn |
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| Handwriting sequence of the Chinese character winter |
