How is your Japanese handwriting ?

Konnichi wa.

I'm learning my kanjis, among other things Japanese, and I have a horrible Western handwriting. So, as one would expect, my handriting in Japanese isn't that hot either. Or at least, at this early stage, I write like a baby. My straight lines are, well, pretty straight, creating kanjis that are more like printing caracters. I'm very jealous of those who can write those nice serifs around edges and create in an effortless manner those lovely upside-down trapezoids instead of plain squares.

I try to imagine the kanji in a sort of imaginary square. But since most kanjis start with a horizontal stoke, I tend to start too high or too low. If I could start with a vertical stroke, I could limit it's height and fill the rest accordingly.

Now the worse part : I'm left handed! Stroking from left to right isn't very natural to me. I always crossed my 't's from right to left, following the normal flow of my pen. Kanjis have a huge number of left to right strokes.

Will I get better with time ? Hmmmm, doubt it! If my experience with Hebrew told me anything - where my first scapbooks where filled with nice yet unimaginatively shaped characters. Now, I can't read any papers I've produced since -, I'm afraid it's just going to get worst and worse with time. (And since Hebrew is written from right to left, I thought that I would have had the upper hand in this case ...)

My goal is to master kanji reading / writing. But I won't go after any art contest.

So I'm asking: How's your handwriting ? How "artsy" are you in creating those beautiful shapes ?

Regards.

I would say my Japanese handwriting is better/neater than my English. It's usually neat unless I'm writing fast, but in English I'm always messy.

But I have a problem where I can read more kanji than I can write (since I use Japanese on the computer a lot). So when I try to write certain kanji by hand, when I don't know the stroke order (but can guess a little) or how they look when handwritten, they turn out kind of strange. With practice it becomes better though

I don't have a beautiful handwriting, mainly because I write very quickly...however, if I really make an effort (e.g. when writing a birthday card, my handwriting can look like pure art!) Normally, my Japanese handwriting is uglier looking than when I am writing Latin letters...

I used to be able to write just about any character I could read. Even then, they weren't pretty. Now, I'm lucky if I can write any of them, but can read a fair amount. 100% of the blame is on the computer. Who needs to write?

For some reason my Japanese writing looks like a chicken walked across the page after stepping in ink! Although legible, it is really quite bad. My English writing is also pretty atrocious.

My English and Japanese handwriting is pretty bad. I've been that way since I was a little kid. If I try hard, I can write neat, though. Strange thing is I wish I was an artist...

I write pretty neat. I write small and close to each other, even kanjis with 10+ strokes, so it looks pretty cramped together.

Keiichi

OK. The first time I learned any alphabet at all, was in first grade (more or less). I had no problems at all understanding the print-style characters, and my teachers were pretty happy with my progress. Then the class started going through stuff like cursive Hebrew, which somewhat confused me, specifically four symbols: Zayin and Gimmel (which were mirror images of one another, like the print-style hiragana to and u.) and Final Mem and Samek (which were .. the same thing..).

Then I started learning the English alphabet. Pretty much on my own, absorbing it. For the first ~3 years of my studies I have used upper and lower case characters MIXED, almost all the time, and only started caring somewhere on seventh grade.

IN the meantime, my Hebrew handwriting just got worse. My Noon looked like Khaf and my Khet looked just like Theth... Not to mention my messy final characters!..

Oh, yeah, and then I had to learn Cursive English. Which at least made my handwriting look somewhere near OK, but it's still unreadable by most people.

I think it shows on my art, since most people don't get what the heck I mean most of the time

Of course, my teachers hated my handwriting, so did my employers, and check this out - I often couldn't make sense of what I actually wrote somewhere unless I had remembered it.

And I like drawing hands.

A true story of an odd person.

How important is it to have good handwriting? In English there is a huge variety of acceptable ways to write the same letters - my handwriting is pretty hard to read, but it is an expression of my personality. I hate handwriting that looks like print.

I have wondered before, how much individuality is acceptable when writing Japanese?

I got my nihon no sensei to write out some kanji for me in my last lesson so I could see what was acceptable from a native speaker's point of view. I was surprised how scratcy and/or spaced out you can make it. He commented that mine looked too perfect, like a caligrapher - shame on me.

Poor you, it must be terrible to have perfect kanji, I feel sorry for you, LOL! I think your sensei would like my kanji better!

hi! i joined yesterday. now that i'm here i realised i'm going to be the late one...again. i'm going to be clueless on the japanese stuff. i'm just learning you know. so if you would...could you help me on spelling them and learning the words,Please!

Miss_apollo7 said:

I don't have a beautiful handwriting, mainly because I write very quickly...however, if I really make an effort (e.g. when writing a birthday card, my handwriting can look like pure art!) Normally, my Japanese handwriting is uglier looking than when I am writing Latin letters...

Click to expand...

cute picture! :hilarious: