Chinese Alphabet

In China, there are more than 3,000 dialects of Chinese being spoken; however, Chinese writing symbols are all the same across the regions. Chinese writing characters go back more than 3,000 years. The symbols began as pictures. A standard set of characters to be used throughout the Middle Kingdom came out in 221 B.C. when China was unified for the first time.

In ancient China, students had to memorize many pictures or characters each week and used brushes and ink to paint the “words”. We only have to learn the 26 letters in the alphabet to be able to read and write. Imagine trying to memorize hundreds even thousands of pictures to be able to read and write.

Chinese character writing is done in columns, from top to bottom and from right to left. So you start writing in the upper right-hand corner of the page.