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Gaining Familarity With Stroke Order & Radicals

The following study tool assumes that you have already read the previous article, Basic Information On Chinese Characters. Once we have a general understanding of the types of strokes that are possible and the basic rules that they have a tendency to follow, then we can jump straight into learning characters.

This list of 1,995 characters is based off of the book Learn to Read Chinese Fast! by Alan Hoenig, and the stroke order diagrams are from Purple Culture. It is a lot of images, so it may take a moment to fully load. If an image returns a broken link, please right-click it and select "Reload Image".

For now, we are going to completely ignore both the meaning and the pronunication of each character. We are focused only on how they are written. It might seem counterintuitive to approach them like this, but it is helpful to gain some familiarty with a single aspect of them before adding on more information. Sometimes people become overwhelmed when trying to "take in" too much at once. Let's go through it patiently...

The characters within this list build upon themselves and/or are grouped by their visual similarity to one another. The stroke order diagrams are read from left-to-right, top-to-bottom. Each square is a step in writing the character, and the stroke that is highlighted in red is the one that we are focused upon. Note how the strokes taper. This often gives a hint on where each stroke begins and where it ends, and thus the direction that it is written in. The strokes themselves are organized into groups of five to make it easy to determine how many strokes are within more visually "complex" characters at a glance.

Try to write each character in this list one after another. As you do so, always follow the stroke order! Keep in mind how the structure of each character relates to all of the ones that came before it within the list. Notice how some collections of strokes seem to repeat across characters. By the time that you have done a few hundred characters, the stroke order rules will probably start to become a habit. One will begin to develop a "character sense". This will make it easier to distinguish between characters that seem very similar from one another, and eventually, one will have some idea of how to write characters immediately upon seeing them without having to look up their stroke order first.



Contents

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