ChineseTones recommend you learn standard Chinese Mandarin first (watching real-life videos and practicing listening and speaking, because it’s best to learn whole phrases and sentences in context). Meanwhile, you may need some knowledge of Pinyin, if you are a newbie learner. After mastering the basic sentences, you can start learning some general knowledge about Chinese characters.

General knowledge about Chinese characters:
1. There are two forms of the Chinese written language at present: simplified Chinese is used in Mainland China; traditional Chinese is used in Taiwan, Hong Kong and Macau and some overseas Chinese communities.
ChineseTones mainly focuses on teaching simplified Chinese.

As you can see, these are the same character 汉 in different fonts. The popular fonts are Song, Kai, and Bold.

2. As same as with English letters, Chinese characters are composed of strokes. The stroke order (which strokes come first, second etc) is very important to learn. The number of strokes is called the stroke count.

Note: The character in the above picture is formed by the strokes surrounding it, in which the number refers to stroke order.

3. ChineseTones recommends learners start from common radicals. Chinese characters are semantic characters which can be divided into single characters and compound characters. Compound characters are composed of two or more single characters, for example, component “日、月” can form a lot of characters.
For example, the single character 日 can be seen in the following compound characters:
日——明、昨、星
Similarly, the single character月can be seen in the following compound characters:
月——阴、明、萌、脖、肚、胃
Common radicals：

4. You may have noticed Pinyin written above or below Chinese characters. Each character has a corresponding reading (or sound) represented by the Pinyin.

5. How do Chinese characters compose of phrases?
2500 common Chinese characters make over one million phrases through compounding, subordination, etc.Thus, to recognize a certain amount of characters is the most important and fast approach to master Chinese language.

6. How to write Chinese articles?
The rules for writing traditional Chinese include writing from top to bottom and from left to right. You generally won’t see spaces between characters, unlike in English where words are separated by spaces.

If you want to input Chinese characters in your computer, please look at Help.