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Chinese Characters

The unity of the Chinese writing is the character. There are Currently, in Chinese dictionaries, 214 elementary characters. By combining those elementary character, we can form a multitude of Chinese words. The first Chinese dictionary, Shuowen jiezi of Lu Shen, writen around 100 A.D, contains 9,353 characters divided into 540 elementary characters. There are now more than 60,000. But this account variants of the same Chinese character. The total number of different characters must be around 20,000. To read current Chinese, we must know between 2000 and 3000 chinese characters. To read the Chinese classic literature, it needs around 10,000.

The classical Chinese is the written language used since ancient times. The use of writing spoken language really appear in the last century with the collapse of the empire.

More than an picture, the Chinese character is a sequel of lines. The order of writing is very important, as well as the direction of each line. It is essential to respect this order. Just as if Chinese student learned how to trace our letters without the right direction, its writing would become soon illegible, who wrote the Chinese characters can not ignore this rule. Otherwise what he writes is not Chinese. This is especially important in calligraphy styles increasingly in semi-cursive and cursive style .

Here are seven basic rules for the order of writing Chinese characters:

1. Trace first horizontally and then vertically.
2. Trace the line descending towards the left and then the one descending to the right.
3. Write from top to bottom.
4. Write-from left to right.
5. Draw lines outside before lines inside.
6. Close after completing the square.
7. If the Chinese character is symmetrical, trace the middle line first.

The Chinese character is written in a fictitious square.

Its beauty depends largely on the balance of the Chinese character in the square. To practice Chinese calligraphy, the Chinese students use different grid model in which they write the characters: see the differents grid models.

The Chinese character can be composed of one or more elementary characters. Many of the characters are composed of two: one makes sense, the other give a phoneme indication. For example the Chinese character "mom":
It is composed on the left of the chinese character "women":
And on the right of the chinese character "horse":

The “woman” character obviously carries meaning. The “horse” character, pronounced "ma" bears the phoneme. "Mom" is pronounced as "ma", just the intonation change.

One thing is still very important for the apprentice calligrapher: in the fifties, Chinese government had undertaken a simplification of Chinese characters while Chinese from Hong Kong, Macao, Taiwan and The diaspora have kept the classic characters. Now we talk of simplified character and traditional characters (or classic characters). In Chinese calligraphy we use rather the traditional Chinese characters which are much more aesthetic.