I often joke with my friends that my penmanship in Chinese is comparable to a first-grader. While I wish I were joking, I have come to learn that writing in Chinese can actually be quite difficult. Growing up, my parents tried to teach me how to write the occasional Chinese character, but the complexity of the language often discouraged me from pursuing it further. You see, unlike English, with our easy-to-memorize alphabet, Chinese relies on characters. Letters in English represent a sound and those sounds can be tied-up together to form words. Words in Chinese, however, have their own individual character.
To further increase the level of difficulty, Hong Kong, Macau (a former Portuguese colony next to Hong Kong) and Taiwan still use traditional Chinese writing. Several decades ago, the rest of China introduced a system to simplify the Chinese writing system. This new system removed a number of strokes from characters and made it easier to learn how to write. However, as Hong Kong was a British colony at the time, it kept the traditional Chinese writing style.
