As a Chinese teacher, I have developed many tricks and techniques to help with all sorts of student’s learning styles. Although more and more people are beginning to learn Chinese, for the most part, many are only focusing on learning how to speak Chinese. This is unfortunate because learning how to read and write creates a better connection to words.

Maybe having a better understanding of the characters first will help. Characters can be described in three ways:

1. Pictographic Method
This is the earliest method to create the most original Chinese characters. Examples: “日(rì) sun,” “月(yuè) moon,” “水(shuǐ) water,” “火(huǒ) fire” and so on, which take the shape of each term. These pictographic Chinese characters changed the original characters of the physical into subsequent founder fonts after gradual evolution, and some reduction in the number of strokes and some strokes added by the rules have become irregular fonts.

2. Associative Law
It’s easier to see the creation of truth through pictographic Chinese characters, but they should not express an abstract meaning. The ancients would have created another law known as the “ideographic law” in which they used different symbols or borrowing pictographic characters to add some symbols to express an abstract meaning. For example, the Chinese character “明(míng)” is made up of “日(rì) sun ” and “月(yuè) moon,” which means bringing bright.

(Chinese characters are not hieroglyphs. They are a mixture of pictograms, ideograms, phono-semantic compounds and others.)

3. Pictophonetic Law
Ideographic characters and pictographic characters can be seen from the shape on the meaning of the words, but they are not allowed to deliver voice. Therefore, people created sound law-shaped characters to express the sound of voices and the meaning of the side next to match the shape. A lot of new words came into being. For example, the Chinese character “爸(bà) father ” is made up of a phonetic character “巴(bā) bar ” and meaning character “父(fù) father .” According to statistics, pictophonetic characters account for about 90% of Chinese characters. The formation and development of Chinese characters became an important tool for the exchange of ideas that adapted to

This leads us to stroke order and how important it is to help your memory stick.

4. Stroke Order

Don’t write off writing so fast! Maybe you just need to reinforce proper stroke order for more consistency and muscle memory. I have found that students who haven't committed correct stroke order to memory have a hard time remembering characters too.

Every Chinese character is made up of a number of strokes, or single movements of the pen or calligraphy 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.

In general — and there are exceptions — 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.

The number of strokes varies between 1 and 17.​

With some of these explanations in mind, try making a mind-muscle connection with what you are writing and the word.

Try using stroke order with “我 (wŏ) I”

wŏ
我
I

The last and most useful method to learn Chinese characters is to really understand the “​Chinese alphabet”. No, there isn’t one but the list of Chinese radicals is a rough equivalent of a Chinese "alphabet". Every Chinese character is classified under a radical, the radicals being sorted by the number of strokes used in writing them.

There are 214 radicals. These are usually sorted by the number of strokes. For example, 一 comes before 二. Actually, these radicals have different values, so Mandarin teachers would teach radicals sequentially. Radicals are common components, located on the top, bottom, left, right, or outer part of characters, which usually indicate the class of meaning to which a character belongs.

For example, “好 (hǎo)”, “妈 (mā)”, “姐 (jiě)”, and “妹 (mèi)” are grouped under the radical “女 (nǚ)”, which is the common component on the left side of these characters.

Radicals are parts of a character that indicate meaning or pronunciation. Knowing the radicals will give you some hint at what that character means in some cases. This can be extremely useful when you need a bit of help recognizing a character you can almost remember. Therefore, knowing radicals will help you commit characters to memory.

Just think of the various bits of information you have about Chinese characters now are like puzzle pieces. You can put them together to help make logical sense of what you are doing. Once it all makes sense make flashcards and the like and try writing again. It’s just a matter of accepting the information and getting your hand to remember the stroke order as well as your brain memorizing the meaning.