Patterns in Chinese Characters

Introduction

The patterns approach is a technique I developed to teach myself to read Chinese characters more effectively, and to reduce the intimidation factor at the same time.

The patterns approach should appeal to anyone with an analytical mind, anyone who likes to find logic and simplicity in something that seems at first overwhelmingly complicated.  It should be a highly useful technique not only to those who wish to write Chinese characters, but also to those who just want to learn to read them.  Learning to recognize patterns can dramatically speed up the process of remembering Chinese characters, because it gives the student an efficient way of cataloging and cross-referencing a vast amount of visual information.

Recognising patterns in Chinese characters is not a radical new concept.  Most students have heard the structure of characters described as "left to right, top down and inside out".  These are important concepts which are treated too casually, and are soon abandoned in favor of traditional teaching methods of repetition and mechanical routine.

In fact, it's worth remembering "left to right" and "top down", because they are recurring themes in many other patterns ("inside out" is more questionable, more on that later).  However, such simple rules are not only incomplete, they can in certain cases be misleading, or plain wrong.  If we are to construct a complete framework for studying Chinese writing based on patterns, then we must clarify, refine and formalize these basic rules in a way that they really do tell the "whole story".

The patterns described here are grouped into three categories:

- Stroke patterns - these describe individual strokes, stroke direction, and multiple strokes are combined within a character (patterns s1-)

- Progression patterns - these describe how complex characters are built up from groups of strokes (patterns p1-)

- Aesthetic patterns - these describe how strokes and other aspects of a character are altered to give the whole character a balanced, aesthetic look (patterns a1-)

How do we know that our patterns are complete?  If they are, we should be able to take any Chinese character, even a very complicated one with over 20 strokes, and decompose it into some number of patterns which fully describe it.  As we learn more and more patterns, we'll apply them to increasingly more complex characters, to prove that each one is built up from the patterns we already kno

notes:

• the patterns can be applied to both traditional and simplified characters (all the examples in this text will use traditional characters unless noted otherwise)
• the patterns do attempt to address the aesthetic (not only the structural) nature of Chinese characters, and describe how to construct "balanced" characters
• the patterns do not address the more advanced writing techniques, such as stroke thickness and curvature - this is left to practitioneres of calligraphy
• the studying of patterns must be supplemented by traditional practice methods to lead to fluency

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