The strokes order

Chinese people seek harmony everywhere, even in writing, to the extent that calligraphy in China is considered a real art. For this reason, in order to be able to properly write a character it is necessary to know the writing order of its strokes, as to say the sequence according to which each stroke must be written.

Besides, it is important to take into account the proportions of the strokes and to imagine the character as written into a hypothetical square. Otherwise, the characters will be unintelligible and inelegant.

For example:

我叫晓安 My name is Xiao An
wǒ jiào xiǎo ān

If we write this sentence without respecting the right proportions and writing for example the right and left sides of each characters overly big, we could get something like this:

手戈口丩日尧安

That is to say a sequence of meaningless words.

THE STROKES

There are two types of strokes: the basic ones and the compound ones. Here is a list of the most common strokes.