Learn How to Write in Chinese | Write Anything in Chinese in 2 Minutes!

If you want to learn to write in Chinese, it's important to know the fundamentals of the characters.

First of all, there are two types of Chinese characters:

1) Simplified
2) Traditional

The Han Dynasty published the first dictionary of Chinese characters in about 100 A.D., which had almost 10,000 characters.

Then, in 1716, the Kangxi dictionary was written. It included just under 50,000 characters!

Many people still speak & write in traditional Chinese characters, though the "simplified" version is common as well, as it was created by the Chinese government in 1956, and it is much easier to learn.

There are about 6,500 simplified Chinese characters, and around 13,500 Traditional Chinese characters today.

That said, there about 1,000 characters that are used commonly, and another 1,500-2,500 or so that well-educated people use less often.

Just as learning the English alphabet is the first step to learning to write in English, learning Chinese characters & the radicals is the 1st step to take if you want to learn to write in Chinese.

Most Chinese dictionaries are grouped by radicals, by the number of strokes in the radical. So what the heck is a radical?

Radicals are the building blocks of Chinese characters. There are 214 of them, and they are the root meaning of characters.

Once you know the 214 radicals, you will have no trouble learning 100's of characters!

There are also 6 major styles of characters:

1) Pictographs - Pictures of people, animals & nature
2) Ideographs - Symbols created to make more words
3) Composite Ideographs - 2 or more symbols together
4) Borrowed Characters - Same sound, different meaning, like "which" & "witch"
5) Phonetic Compounds - Extra sound to show different meaning
6) Transferred Characters - Same radical & characters, but different sound

If you learn the 214 radicals first, then gradually move through the 6 types of characters, you'll know how to write Chinese in no time!

Sound like a ton of work? It is!

BUT...I found a book & software package that helped me learn to write Chinese at my own pace (and it didn't cost $219-$549 like some of the other popular course out there!).

It's called Rocket Chinese, and it's amazing! Check it out if you want to learn to write (and speak) in Chinese quickly with fun software games & step-by-step guides:

Heard of Pinyin characters? Pinyin is simply a standard for learning the phonetics of Mandarin Chinese.

Most schools, books, courses & software packages use Pinyin to teach students how to write Chinese characters, including the one I used: Rocket Chinese.

Pinyin is based on 4 main Chinese tones, and the numbers (1-4) are used to tell which tone to use.

For example, if you wanted to pronounce "Mandarin", the Pinyin characters would be Pu3 Tong1 Hua4, which shows the tones for each of the three components of the word.

This confused me at first, but once I got the tones down I saw how helpful this convention is to break things down...=)

Also, it's important to note that the reason this saves time is because Chinese is NOT alphabetical like English, meaning we can't just directly translate it letter by letter. So, the Pinyin system helps to keep things neatly organized for us when learning to write & speak Chinese.

Are you ready to start learning to write fluently in Chinese? Want to speak Chinese, too?

Well, after looking around online for what seemed like days, I found a few options:

1) Rosetta Stone
2) Pimsleur
3) Rocket Chinese

All 3 of these options are good ones, but here's the deal: overall, Rocket Chinese is my top choice!

Let me explain: it's the same thing as the others, but it costs a LOT less!

With all of the courses you'll get a software program that you can use to play games & learn to write and speak Chinese...

...but, Rosetta Stone costs $219 for Level 1, $239 for Level 2, and $259 for Level 3. Or, you can buy them all for $549!

Pimsleur Approach tries to trick you by making the 1st level only $19.95, but they only include the very basics in that edition.

That way they can get you to buy Level 2 & 3 for $274 EACH!

I didn't want to spend $549 or $568 to learn to write Chinese, and I'll bet you won't either when you find out that Rocket Chinese is only $99.95!

The best part is: Rocket Chinese comes with a PDF eBook with all of their lessons and audio MP3 versions of all of them so you can listen to them on CD or your MP3 player! (You know, like Rosetta Stone charges an extra $40/Level for...)

Plus, you get members-only access to forum community where you can talk with other people learning to write & speak Chinese.

To me, the choice was clear, and it worked out really well!

If you're serious about learning Chinese, but you don't like throwing $100 bills in the toilet, check out Rocket Chinese:

Well, I hope you found what you were looking for on this page!

Feel free to bookmark this page to come back to it (or let others know about it):


If you want to take this further and learn to write & speak Chinese fluently, I highly recommend checking out Rocket Chinese!

It's a really nice program, and you won't have to shell out $500+ like you would with other courses. It's all online, so you can play the software games, read the lessons, and even listen to them on in your car or while you're working out...

The whole course only costs $99.95, and you can access it 5 minutes from right now!

Give it a shot, because learning a new language is one of the greatest things you can do in life. Just imagine: we live in our own little secluded World, even though we speak the most common language on the planet!

There are over 1 billion people that write & speak Chinese, and China is rising as an economic powerhouse, so this is a fantastic language to learn.

Take action and start learning Chinese today...you won't regret it: