Chinese writing is believed to have been invented in the second half of the 2nd millennium BC. It was a pure invention with no transmission of any kind of scripts or writing from elsewhere. Chinese writing is done using Chinese characters known as hanzi. These Chinese characters used to resemble some animals, things or people when they were originally invented. However, over time they have been stylized by different generations of people and now these Chinese characters no longer resemble the shapes they originally symbolized.



Classical Chinese was the predominant form of Chinese writing till early 20th century. Chinese writing and the Chinese characters were borrowed by other countries like Korea, Vietnam and Japan till the time they came up with their own language. This form of classic Chinese writing is not very complex with each Chinese character representing some meaning. Most words in this form of Chinese writing are monosyllabic, with just one Chinese character being required to understand their meaning. This form of Chinese writing underwent a change sometime in the 1920s and another form of Chinese writing came into use. This new form used words which had two or more Chinese characters substituting the classical Chinese writing. Most of the publications since then have been written in this newer form of Chinese writing although the old classical Chinese writing can still be found in some proverbs being used today.

Chinese writing is highly complex with each character being allotted the same amount of space. There are no spaces between characters, further multi characters constituting a single word are not grouped together. This last fact makes the Chinese writing very complex indeed.

There are as many as 56000 characters in Chinese writing. However, most of them are obsolete or very rarely used. Knowledge of about 3000 characters is enough to read and write Chinese. For reading old literature one should know up to 6000 basic Chinese characters. All Chinese characters are written using the same 12 strokes. These 12 strokes are the basis of Chinese writing. One Chinese character may comprise of as many as 64 strokes or as less as just 1.

English language has as many as 8000 syllables while the Chinese writing consists of just 1700 of these. This leads to several syllables which sound the same to have different meanings. Such syllables are called homophones. Chinese writing differentiates amongst homophones by using different Chinese characters to represent them.

Chinese is a difficult language to learn as the Chinese script is highly complex. In an effort to simplify this language up to 200 characters have been modified a little to simplify them. This has increased the popularity of this language a great deal amongst westerners. It is now possible to learn both spoken Chinese and Chinese writing online. Several online Chinese tutorials have been opened which can teach basic Chinese to people right in the comfort of their homes. Such tutorials and Chinese schools are increasing the Chinese language literacy.