They are clearly the same letters, though.

The former is common in print and digital texts, but the latter is much more common in handwritten texts. That’s what this article is about.īefore we start, let’s look at two examples from English to give you an idea what this is about: However, when using phones and computers, you will come across characters that are different from what you have learnt.Įach time I teach a beginner course in Chinese, I get questions about different fonts and computer characters that don’t look like the characters in the textbook or those that I write on the board. In handwritten Chinese, which variant you use matters little, and no one will misunderstand you if you write the “wrong” version. Instead, these are variants of the same characters. However, this is not about simplified and traditional characters these are not listed when enumerating characters that were simplified, for example.

The first in each pair is the standard used in Mainland China, the second is used in Taiwan. Here’s an example of what I mean:Īs you can see, 1 and 2 are slightly different, as are 3 and 4, but they are still the same characters. This won’t teach you all the necessary cases, but it will help you understand how it works so you can then learn what you need. One example of this is character variants and regional standards, which is what I will explain in this article. When learning Chinese characters, there are a number of things that can be really confusing if you don’t know what’s going on.

Chinese style letters fonts