Written Chinese/Calligraphy
From Wikibooks, the open-content textbooks collection
[edit] Strokes
Chinese characters consists of strokes as their fundamental elements, the same way as English words consists of letters as their fundamental elements. These strokes can be easily learned, unless you want to learn the Chinese Calligraphy, which is already an art in Chinese culture. The image below shows all strokes that all Chinese characters are made up of. In pairs they show to you how the strokes will look like in two different writing medias: the left ones are written by the ink brush, right ones are how you will write them by normal ball-pens.
The following diagram shows you how to write these strokes. It's quite straight-forward: just start at the red dot, and trace the strokes as shown with your pen. Repeat this until you can write these strokes at ease, with the exact shape as shown.
File:Write chinese strokes.gif
[edit] Character formations
The Chinese characters should be written in proper scale, or else it would be not only weird, but wrong, just like you wouldn't write the vertical line in the English letter "d" into 3 times the height of the circle that follows.
Chinese characters can be thought as contained in invisible blocks, and they're divided in proportion into these blocks in several ways. Look at the following diagram for details.
These formations can be in any proportion, depending on the complexity and amount of strokes in different places in the characters. Be aware of this feature, for the proportioning is one of the key to writing nice Chinese characters. The following diagram illustrates some of the examples.
Also, these formations can be included in one another to form other characters. The following diagram illustrates this feature with the same set of characters.
