Thanks for coming to learn more about Chinese culture!

The Chinese script that we know today has come through many changes. The earliest Chinese scripts were found on oracle bones, that were used for divination about 2,000 BCE.

In Chinese there are eight basic strokes that make up all character. There is the dot (Dian “丶”), the horizontal stroke (Heng “一”), the vertical stroke (Shu “丨”), the hook (Gou “亅”), the rising stroke (Ti “ ”), the downward left slant (Pie “丿”), the downward right slant (Na “ ”,) and the folding stroke (Zhe “𠃋”). These strokes work together to build radicals which can alone be a character but they also work together to form characters with other radicals. There are just over 200 radicals all with different meanings. Learning a character's stroke order can be a way of preserving the way handwritten characters are written is part of the importance in learning Chinese. When writing characters beginners in elementary school in China also must master stroke order. (add and image) Character writing paper is often utilized. This paper has boxes that characters can be written in. There are 12 different types of these boxes and character shapes [@n3]. (add this image too) Depending on what radicals are in the character it will determine where writer should start writing the character in different boxes based on the character.

Fun facts: The Chinese were the first to discover paper and bamboo brushes. Both these have changed our forms of communication forever, and it started with China. Though Chinese characters have come a long way since then which is seen in there history. Once of the latest developments is the transition of using Chinese characters online and working to translate handwritten Chinese characters to text online. Pictures to text and hand writing to text has been a big development for languages over the last few years, though an area China has struggled to keep up because of there being no alphabet. There are many articles that discuss the topic of parsing Chinese characters. One of the most recent changes to the Chinese written language was the division of both Simplified Chinese Characters and Traditional Chinese Characters. This has become divided by region as well. This was a debated change because with the simplification of Chinese Characters, while they became easier and faster to write they also lost much of their art and beauty some would argue.