Painting Chinese Characters: My First Brush Strokes

Have you ever painted with a brush made of soft animal hair, dipped in black ink instead of paint? That is how people in China have written words for thousands of years! Every Chinese character is like a tiny picture, painted one careful stroke at a time.

- How to hold and use a Chinese brush - The three basic strokes: the line, the tall line, and the dot - What three simple characters mean: person, mountain, and sun - How to practice painting your own characters

A Chinese writing brush is called a maobi. It has a soft, pointy tip made of animal hair. Instead of a bottle, ink often comes as a hard black stick that is rubbed with water on a flat stone called an inkstone, until it turns into smooth black ink. Then the brush dips in and paints onto special paper called rice paper.

Almost every Chinese character is built from a few basic strokes. Today you will learn three: heng, a flat line going side to side. Shu, a straight line going up and down. And dian, a small dot made by tapping the brush down and lifting it back up.

The character 人 (person) is just two brush strokes that look like a person's two legs walking. The character 山 (mountain) has three tall lines that look like three mountain peaks in a row. The character 日 (sun) is a square with a line through the middle — long ago, it started as a circle with a dot, like a little drawing of the sun in the sky.