Chinese Characters: Simply Strokes?

By: fongsuimy

A Chinese character is in effect a word. It is made up of many strokes and looks more like a picture than a word. There are over five thousand Chinese characters, although knowledge of two thousand is enough for effective communication. The order that the strokes are written is very critical.
With English, you can write a character the way you were taught in school or you can choose to write it in your way. As long as the end result is the same it is acceptable. This is not so with Chinese characters. The stroke order must be correct or else the character is wrong. Sometimes, it may end up meaning something else.
Some characters have simple stroke sequence needing less than four three or four strokes, while some of the more difficult ones can have an upwards of twenty different strokes, all of which need to be remembered for the stroke order in which they come in. If just one stroke is wrong it is deemed to be written wrong.
Most Chinese characters have two or more meanings which can make learning Chinese very hard. However it can be rewarding once you learn it.
Many Asian cultures such as the Japanese and Korean make use of Chinese characters. In recent years, some of these characters were changed to make them uniquely Japanese or Korean, many other characters remain the same. Most even retain the same meaning.
Unlike in the English language where one character seldom means anything on its own, one Chinese character usually means whole words, sometimes several, all on its own, and when combined with others can add description and create whole sentences. Since characters usually have more than one meanings it is up to the reader to understand what context the character is written in and what meaning was meant when it was written.

Article Source: http://www.articlepro.co.uk/international

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