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Chinese Character Tutorial

If you're interested in reading and writing Chinese characters, there's no better place to get started than with the numbers 1-10. They are quite simple to write, useful to know, and are exactly the same in both the traditional and simplified writing systems.

So grab a piece of paper and a pencil, give a click on the links below, and try to write the characters with proper stroke order as demonstrated:

Now that you know these characters, you actually know how to read and write all the numbers through 100. That's because Chinese follows a very simple pattern for counting:

Ready for a challenge? Let's try something a little more interesting:

Because the Chinese simplified system is based on the traditional one, many characters are exactly the same in both systems, as we saw with the the numbers 1-10. Even for characters that aren't the same, you will often be able to see similarities. For example, have a look at the character for "love" in the simplifiedand traditional systems. Almost the same, right?

To get a bit more practical, here are the 25 most frequently used characters in the Chinese language:
Source: http://technology.chtsai.org/charfreq/