Given the current popularity of Chinese tattoos you might be surprised to learn that for a long time tattooing in China was regarded as a 'bad' thing.

The reason for this is because it violates the body. In fact the literal translation of the chinese words for tattooing, "Ci Shen", is "to puncture the body”. Westerners may find it hard to understand this concept but it is very deep in our culture.

If you’ve studied Chinese characters, you know that each number has its own Chinese character. As a joke, many Chinese-illiterate foreigners boast that they know three Chinese characters: 一 二 三 (1, 2, 3). After 3, though, the characters start getting a little harder to remember. Or do they? Recently I discovered this little-known character: 亖. It means 4. I didn’t find a similar one for 5, though.

Stroke Types
Strokes are traditionally classified into eight basic forms, each appearing in the character "eternally" and listed below according to their contemporary names. Though somewhat arbitrary, this system has remained popular for nearly two millenia.

1. "Dian" - A simple dot.

2. "Heng" - Horizontal stroke, left to right.

As you might have learned, Chinese characters are symbols that mostly denote their significances. Characters that belong to the same meaning group are said to have the same bushou, sometimes translated as a radical. A bushou is actually the part of the character that indicates the meaning group to which the character belong.

Four-character idioms, or chéngyǔ are a set of traditional idiomatic expressions, most of which consists of four Chinese characters. Chengyu were widely used in Classical Chinese and are still common in Vernacular Chinese writing and Spoken Chinese today. According to the most stringent definition, there are about 5,000 chengyu in the Chinese language, though some dictionaries list over 20,000.

Dragon is a mystical animal in China and has significant influence on Chinese culture in China.
Below are some different calligraphic symbols of dragon in traditional Chinese, which were written by the greatest Chinese calligraphists in Chinese history, like Wang Xizhi, for example. You may use this to do a Chinese dragon tattoo just enjoy the beauty of these Chinese characters.

While English learning has been the rage in China for decades, Chinese as a foreign language is just starting to catch on on the other side of the Pacific Ocean .

The study of Chinese used to be concentrated on a few college campuses and in large ethnic Chinese communities on both coasts of North America . But now it is spreading to places where, only a decade ago, such a widespread and sustained interest in the language seemed unimaginable.

Different from Western characters, Chinese characters are square and indicate either pronunciation or meaning or both. Chinese characters provide a convenient tool for imagery thinking, and thus most Chinese people are good at imagery thinking.

Chinese characters usually have one or more meanings and some of them are particularly loved by Chinese people. Here is the top ten list of the lucky ones. Please note Pinyin is also used here, which is the Chinese spelling system for the characters. For example, fu is the pinyin for good luck in Chinese. But fu is only the phonic part of the character and it also represents other Chinese characters that sound the same.

Because the Chinese language is a logographic language in which one "character" corresponds roughly to one "word" or meaning there are vastly more characters, or glyphs, than there are keys on a standard computer keyboard.

To allow the input of Chinese using standard keyboards a variety of keyboard input methods have been designed.