Brief Introduction of Chinese Characters:
1. Chinese character has been used for thousands of years by generations of Chinese people. It is a kind of ideographic character, which is used as not only a tool of communication but also work of art from the view of calligraphy. Now, simplified Chinese is used in the mainland China, while traditional Chinese is used in Taiwan, Hong Kong, Macao and some other places of abroad.
One Chinese character contains one syllable. Sometimes, a Chinese character has its own meaning, which can be equal to an English word; sometimes a character has no meaning but just a symbol of a sound or a word with different meaning, which cannot be regarded to be equal to the meaning of a specific English word. An English word is the combination of sounds and meaning which cannot be further fractionized. It might take one or more Chinese characters to fully express its meaning.
e.g. love (爱 ài), revolution (革命 gémìng), France (法兰西 Fǎlánxī), Marxism (马克思主义 Mǎkèsīzhǔyì)
Chinese character is called “zì” (字); an English word is called “cí” (词). A dictionary of characters is called “zìdiǎn” (字典); A dictionary of words is called “cídiǎn” (词典).
e.g. Xīnhuá dictionary can be translated into: both Xīnhuá zìdiǎn (新华字典) and Xīnhuá cídiǎn (新华词典) but an English dictionary cannot be translated into: Yīngyǔ zìdiǎn (英语字典) but: Yīngyǔ cídiǎn (英语词典).
2. Writing rules for the Chinese characters:
A. Strokes (points and lines which form the frame of a character) — there are eight basic writing styles of strokes. They are:
1) 点 diǎn (point)
2) 横 héng (horizontal stroke)
3) 竖 shù (vertical stroke)
4) 撇 piě (left-falling stroke)
5) 捺 nà (right-falling stroke)
6) 提 tí (lifting stroke)
7) 钩 gōu (hook stroke)
折 zhé (turning stroke)

(The character “永” is a typical character contains these eight styles of strokes. But a stroke should be measured from its beginning writing point until raising the pen at the ending point. So the character“永” should have 5 strokes.
Every stroke of a character must be correctly written. More or less strokes would mean mistakes or become neither canonical nor normative.)
B. Basic stroke writing orders :
1) first horizontal then vertical e.g. 十， 于
2) first left-falling then right-falling e.g. 八， 天
3) first up then down e.g. 三， 豆
4) first left then right e.g. 地， 做
5) first in then out e.g. 函， 廷
6) first inter then close e.g. 日 ， 国
7) first middle then beside e.g. 小 ， 水