Please Note: This review was produced independently of Rocket Chinese but does contain affiliate links.
When some learners start to learn Chinese, they feel a bit intimidated because of the characters. It’s rumoured that there are thousands of them and they are difficult to learn, but actually with the right learning tools, learning characters will only help you to master Chinese.
In reality, characters make memorizing vocabulary much easier. For example, don’t remember if yòu means left or right? Just look at the character 右 which has the mouth radical 口. For the most of us, right hand is the one we use for eating, so of course 右 means right! Or if you are left-handed, then you can memorize that you do work 工 with your left (左 zuǒ) hand.
What is great about Rocket Chinese is that it will teach you to write characters in an easy and systematic way. You will learn the correct stroke order for Chinese characters, which helps you to get the characters to your muscle memory, as you always write a character in the same order.
In some cases, you will also be shown how Chinese characters have evolved through the centuries. Because the very first characters were pictograms all those centuries ago, you might be able to guess a few character’s meaning just by looking at it. For example you can see the characters for up 上 shàng and down 下 xià. Really logical right!
Even though the study tips and pictures are very helpful for you when you’re starting out in writing Chinese, what is even more helpful, are the video clips on Rocket Chinese where you can see how the characters are really written.
Take out a paper and pencil and follow the video to write the character. Pay attention to stroke order and the length of the strokes. Rocket Chinese even has a special lesson to show you how much difference a stroke bit too long or short might make. For example characters 土 and 士 have a completely different meaning. But don’t worry! Rocket Chinese will help you to pay attention to the details.
There are seven lessons in total for writing, each one of them consisting of four or five parts. They are all laid out on your learning roadmap or the My Study Plan. Get your pen and papers and get started to write Chinese!