0125 Stroke Order

English has 26 letters. Learn ‘em and chances are that, silent g, silent k and the whole bough, cough, through, though and rough thing aside, you’ll be able to sound out any word you come across. Chinese, on the other hand, is phonetic-lite. Knowing 2,000 characters won’t help you pronounce the 2001st . So, how do you look up a character you don’t know? In a word: strokes. Chinese writing is like golf: it’s all about the number of strokes. Count the strokes in the unknown character, consult the list at the front of the dictionary organized by stroke number, locate your character and turn to the page it’s on. Can’t find your character under, say, 7? Check the list of those with 6 or 8. It’s enough to give you a stroke but take heart: not even Chinese people get the stroke count right every time. #ceas #china #hacker