There are actually thousands of distinctive Chinese characters. In real life a working knowledge of two thousand characters is sufficient for everyday use. Many of these characters are difficult to write (or draw) and each of them has a specific stroke order. The lines and curve that make up the character must be written in a pre-defined order..

With English, you can write a character the way you were taught in school or you can choose to write it in your way. As long as the end result is the same it is acceptable. This is not the case with Chinese characters. The stroke order must be right or else the character is wrong. In some cases, it may end up meaning something else.

Simple Chinese characters have three or four strokes. However complex characters can have more than twenty different strokes. The difficult part is remembering the stroke sequence. They must be written in the same manner or the word can be considered wrong.

Learning Chinese can be hard especially when each Chinese character can have two or more meanings depending on the context that it is used. Nonetheless it can be very satisfying once you learn it.

Many Asian characters such as the Japanese and Korean characters are based on the Chinese characters. While the Japanese and Korean governments have introduced new character set to replace the Chinese set, you can still find elements of Chinese characters in daily use and especially in historical monuments.

In English, several characters (alphabets) make up a word. In Chinese each character is a word that can have more than one meaning. Therefore to understand the meaning of a statement we need to look at the entire sentence and understand the context that the character is written to get the meaning.