Learn Chinese Characters Lesson 3


This is the third of five free lessons about Chinese characters' strokes.

Lesson 3:
Strokes Order

Strokes Order

In the previous lessons you have come to know that every Chinese character is composed by strokes and you have got the complete list of both simple and complex strokes.

In this lesson you are going to learn that strokes cannot be written in any order one wishes. A definite strokes order must be followed.

You may wonder why (I did!-) After all, wouldn't the result be exactly the same?

In order to understand why, please consider this:

Usually dictionaries list characters alphabetically according to their pronunciation (pin yin). But what if you need to find a character, but you don't know its pronunciation?

Dictionaries have lists of characters grouped by number and/or sequence of strokes, so that you'll find, for example, a list of characters all composed by ten strokes and all starting with a vertical stroke, or a list of ten strokes characters starting with a dot, and so on.

That's why it's imperative to standardize strokes and strokes order.

One more reason:

How would a Chinese girl feel watching you writing a Chinese character ignoring any rule about direction or strokes order? She would feel exactly as you watching someone writing "Frank" this way:

Frank animation

Did you get the point?

As you can see in the table below, I have used animations to illustrate the rules about the right sequence to follow writing Chinese characters. Enjoy it!

ORDER OF STROKES
Rule
HORIZONTAL FIRST, VERTICAL LATER
Example
Example 1
Sequence
Animation 1
Rule
LEFT-FALLING FIRST, RIGHT-FALLING LATER
Example
Example 2
Sequence
Animation 2
Rule
FROM TOP TO BOTTOM
Example
Example 3
Sequence
Animation 3
Rule
FROM LEFT TO RIGHT
Example
Example 4
Sequence
Animation 4
Rule
OUTSIDE FIRST, INSIDE LATER
Example
Example 5
Sequence
Animation 5
Rule
LAST CLOSE THE DOOR
Example
Example 6
Sequence
Animation 6
Rule
CENTER FIRST, LEFT AND RIGHT SIDES LATER
Example
Example 7
Sequence
Animation 7
Rule
PASSENGER FIRST, CAR LATER
Example
Example 8
Sequence
Animation 8

Click here for lesson 4 on Chinese characters' strokes.

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