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Lesson 8:  Writing Chinese Characters - Writing Orders

 

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Lesson 10 Writing Chinese Characters – Writing orders

For a character, the order of writing is normally from top to bottom, from left to right, and from outside to inside. 

top to bottom:

1.

san1  

three

2.

zhong4  

crowd

 

left to right:

 3.

ren2  

mercy

 

4.

li3  

courtesy

 

outside to inside:

*Please notice the bottom horizontal line is always the last stroke in this structure.

5.

guo2  

country

6.

qiu2  

prisoner

 

In a paragraph, modern Chinese is written the same way as English, where you write from left to right in each line horizontal and from top to bottom vertically.  Ancient Chinese, however, is written in vertical lines and lines are arranged from right to left.