Different
Strokes: The Chinese
Art of Writing
Do
you like your handwriting well enough to frame it and hang
it on a wall? To the Chinese, writing is an art called calligraphy.
Calligraphy is a popular hobby many Chinese children enjoy. Throughout Asia, Chinese calligraphy is admired just as much as painting.
Special equipment is necessary. Calligraphers use a brush
made of animal hair attached to a bamboo shaft.
Traditional Chinese ink does not come in a bottle but is dried into hard blocks. The best paper for calligraphy is made from rice and comes in long pieces called scrolls. Calligraphers never use erasers.
There
are six different styles of writing characters. To the right,
the character for “moon” is written in each
style.
Every
character has a 
certain
number of strokes. The simplest have just a few strokes,
but the most complex have more than twenty different lines.
Chinese dictionaries are arranged according to the number
of strokes it takes to write a character.
Each Chinese character represents a separate word. In ancient China, characters began as simple drawings.
