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Chinese Characters

Chinese characters started with pictographs several thousand of years ago. As the language evolved, simple pictographs were mixed with each other to create more characters. There are more than 80,000 characters but knowing a few thousand is enough for most readings.
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Every Chinese character is made up of a number of strokes, or single movements of the pen or writing brush. The order and direction in which the strokes are made are very important in producing uniform characters, and learning the basic rules of stroke order can also ease the process of learning to write. Following is a list of all the strokes.

Generally, Chinese characters are written from left to right and top to bottom, and horizontal strokes before vertical ones. The outsides of enclosed characters are written before the insides, and dots, strokes that cut through a character, minor strokes and bottom enclosing strokes are written last. Look at the following picture to see how "好" is written.

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Simplified Chinese and Traditional Chinese
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In mainland China a simplified writing system is used, whereas in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and overseas regions the traditional script is being used. Starting from the second half of the nineteenth century, there was a growing consensus that the writing system constituted an obstacle to the achievement of a higher literacy rate. The simplified writing system differs in two ways from the traditional writing system:
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(1) a reduction of the number of strokes per character.
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(2) the reduction of the number of characters in common use (two different characters are now written with the same character).
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A large-scale reform was continued after the founding of the PRC. In 1955 1,053 variant characters were eliminated. In 1956, the Scheme of Simplified Chinese Characters, known later as the First Scheme, was promulgated by the PRC government. It was composed of 525 simplified characters and 54 simplified basic components of characters.

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