Although it's been years since I studied Japanese formally, I have decided upon invitation from a friend of mine to join a calligraphy class and relearn how to write Japanese 'letters' from scratch.
I have been going now twice a month since the end of summer, and I must say that it has been enlightening.
For example, many of you may know that there are two ways to write the hiragana "so" (そ). It can be written as one stroke or two. Currently, it is being taught at elementary school with the one stroke method, but this has not always been the case.
Apparently about 30 years ago, it was taught as two strokes, which is incidentally my preferred way to write it.
At about this time, a student mentioned, without going into detail, how the "proper" stroke order has changed for some kanji since she learned them at school many years ago.
One of the other students in the class (a high school teacher) said that she has heard that every so often the people in the Ministry of Education are told they need to work for a living, so they change something like this just to show something tangible from their tenure.
I don't know if this is true, but it does show me how relative things such as writing are. To say that "this is how it is" is a fallacy even with something as simple as how to write a simple letter.
Still, there remains much to be said about my own writing, and I really need to make it look a lot nicer. Although I still don't care about how my English looks any more than I ever did, I have finally come to not only understand but also 'feel' that in Japanese, how one writes is almost as important as what one writes.
Although there may not be only one "correct" way to write things, some ways are definitely better than others.
I have been going now twice a month since the end of summer, and I must say that it has been enlightening.
For example, many of you may know that there are two ways to write the hiragana "so" (そ). It can be written as one stroke or two. Currently, it is being taught at elementary school with the one stroke method, but this has not always been the case.
Apparently about 30 years ago, it was taught as two strokes, which is incidentally my preferred way to write it.
At about this time, a student mentioned, without going into detail, how the "proper" stroke order has changed for some kanji since she learned them at school many years ago.
One of the other students in the class (a high school teacher) said that she has heard that every so often the people in the Ministry of Education are told they need to work for a living, so they change something like this just to show something tangible from their tenure.
I don't know if this is true, but it does show me how relative things such as writing are. To say that "this is how it is" is a fallacy even with something as simple as how to write a simple letter.
Still, there remains much to be said about my own writing, and I really need to make it look a lot nicer. Although I still don't care about how my English looks any more than I ever did, I have finally come to not only understand but also 'feel' that in Japanese, how one writes is almost as important as what one writes.
Although there may not be only one "correct" way to write things, some ways are definitely better than others.