Chinese characters are the important link for Chinese cultural inheritance. For foreign learners, Chinese characters are so special and full of mystery. More often than not, students are very enthusiastic about and interested in learning Chinese characters. But there are obvious difficulties during this process. For example, students have no clue about how to start writing Chinese characters. What they do is more “drawing” than writing these characters. They are not familiar with phonetic symbols and semantic symbols. They write strokes in wrong order or miss strokes. For Chinese characters with similar shapes, they lack techniques to distinguish and memorize them. This course explains and teaches, by laying out the essentials of hard-tipped calligraphy writing as an example, the strokes, stroke order, phonetic symbols and semantic symbols, and structure of Chinese characters. Students can master the basic strokes and stroke order of Chinese characters, which are essential to future Chinese learning. They get to know both “how” and “why”. This will benefit them when they need to understand and memorize Chinese words.