China the Beautiful

[flyingfire]

Strokes of Chinese Characters 笔画13
Every Chinese character is made up of a number of strokes, or single movements of the pen or writing brush. The order and direction in which the strokes are made are very important in producing uniform characters, and learning the basic rules of stroke order can also ease the process of learning to write.

In general -- and there are exceptions -- characters are written from left to right and top to bottom, and horizontal strokes before vertical ones. The outsides of enclosed characters are written before the insides, and dots, strokes that cut through a character, minor strokes and bottom enclosing strokes are written last.

shuō
说 (Say)
chàng
唱 (Sing)


wŭ
舞 (Dance)
xiào
笑 (Laugh)


gē
歌 (Song)
kū
哭 (Cry)

[chinapage]

There are several excellent website that teach you the proper
way (sequence) of writing Chinese characters. The best
known web site is
http://www.mandarintools.com

Here are two examples:

http://www.chinapage.com/pei/c3f7.gif
http://www.chinapage.com/pei/c1faj.gif

[chinapage]

The ability of displaying a sequence of graphs has been
available for many years in the "gif" file standards.

Here are two more examples:





For some reasons,this has never been adopted widely.

More recently, the use of 'Flash' has gained more attentions by
the writers.

Ming

[chinapage]

Flash shockwave swf seems to be gaining favor among writers recently.
This is an example :

http://www.chinapage.com/word/stroke-order/an_2.swf