Chinese Characters

Seattle Polyglots Wiki / Chinese Characters (汉字 Hanzi)

SeeAlso: Mandarin | Cantonese | Chinese Regional Dialects

This page is for linking to information about chinese characters that are common to Chinese characters, and perhaps about tools that can be shared in the region.

Group Consideration:
Consider bringing a whiteboard and dry-erase pen to your meetups.

Native Chinese writers can write very quick, and often scribble out radicals in ways that are hard for novices to read. If you are teaching, please be sure to write for a low common denominator.

Strokes
Characters are generally written left to right, top to bottom. There are hooks and dots too.

Radicals
(Tou Zou You) --*blank* Peng   Many characters are pronounced the same as other characters. It is a common occurance to have to clarify which character people are talking about, so the radical gets named, left,right,top,bottom...

Comparison to other languages
Common Greek and Latin root words/ prefixes and suffixes translated into Chinese (derivative work from another website, created by User:AirOp, will be posted if I can get rights)

Calligraphy
water calligraphy magic fabric (about 10bucks for a set) User:AirOp has some that can be borrowed

Ink

Textbook Workbooks
Integrated Chinese version 2 has hand-written examples in the character workbook. The version 3 and 4 are useless because the characters look like calligraphy. Version 1 is illegible because of poor printing quality. --User:AirOp

Vellum Paper exercise books, In Beijing at QingHua University I was able to purchase many workbooks with velum and nicely hand written characters.

Apps:

Chinese Writer (broken after Android 7) Uses the old HSK 1 word set.

Chinese Skill and HelloChinese now have handwriting modules.