This article examines the typological characteristics of Chinese character writing, which serve as a theoretical foundation for optimizing the teaching methodology of Chinese as a foreign language. The relevance of the study is driven by the need to rethink traditional approaches to teaching character writing in the context of the digitalization of education and the growing interest in the Chinese language in Russia. The subject of the research encompasses structural-categorical, psycholinguistic, and digitalization aspects of the character system. The objectives include clarifying key concepts (“stroke,” “grapheme,” “radical,” “character valency”), describing the patterns of reading and writing, and experimentally testing a corpus-based teaching method. The methodological framework draws on the analysis of official language standards of the People's Republic of China, data from electronic corpora, and the results of a pedagogical experiment involving 20 students. The scientific novelty lies in a systematic description of character valency as a didactically significant feature, as well as in the development and implementation of educational character corpora for building character competence. The main conclusion is that the use of a corpus-based approach, which takes into account the frequency, combinability, and categorical affiliation of characters, significantly improves the levels of character recognition (87.3 % vs. 72.1 %), writing (79.5 % vs. 63.8 %), and contextual usage (85.2 % vs. 68.4 %). Methodological recommendations are proposed for integrating the typological features of Chinese writing into the educational process. The results can be applied in the development of teaching materials and digital resources for Chinese language instruction.