writing kanji with a ballpoint pen

Hi,

I'm taking my first tentative steps towards learning Japanese. I apologize if this question has already been asked; it seems like an obvious one, but I haven't seen it addressed:

Books and tutorials about writing kanji nearly always represent characters calligraphically. Strokes have varying widths, subtle curves, hooks, etc. I assume that most beginning students of Japanese want to learn how to write characters with a ballpoint pen, and as lovely as they are, these additional details are a significant distraction. Can anyone recommend a resource that teaches the underlying structure of these characters, presumably the basis for standard handwritten Japanese?

Thanks in advance,


Jay

I may have answered my own question: Kanji Alive is a very nice site.

Planarian,
I think you will find that after a short while you will get used to reading the "serif" style (to misuse the term from western typography). Indeed, the varying width of the lines and the extra dabs of "ink" at the beginning and ends of strokes can help convey the stroke order.
However, I think that writing with ball-point pen can also be beautiful, and there is indeed a rich "everyday calligraphy" around handwritten Japanese. For this, my favorite resource is the well thought-out if somewhat dated text Reading Japanese by Eleanor Harz Jorden.
Each Kanji introduced is given in standard book form, handwritten form, and semi-cursive handwritten form:

Also, there are exercises to using handwritten texts:

Enjoy!

This looks great. Thank you!

Hi planarian, thanks for the shout-out for Kanji alive (I'm one of the developers of the app). The kanji animations in KA were indeed conceived with the needs of students practicing kanji using pencils or ballpoint pens in mind. "Back in the day" in 2002-5 when the animations were originally created almost all the other online resource relied on calligraphic drawings and were very difficult for students to read and copy. Of course, today, there are -lots- of great resources for learning kanji.

Something which might interest you and navaburo is that KA also offers representations of each kanji in the traditional Kyokashotai ("textbook") typeface as well as the mitcho ("serif"), gothic ("sans serif") and maru ("rounded gothic") styles. Just press the up or down arrow while in KA's detail view or click on the animation to toggle the typeface mode then click the left or right arrows to switch styles. We may even add some more typefaces depending on feedback.

If you or other JREF forum readers have any criticisms or ideas for improvement to the free web app feel free to drop me a line.

Hi, if you have an iPhone (or any iDevice)... You might want to download an application called "Imiwa?". It's a dictionary with Kanji as well. I've used it a lot of times during the past year since my arrival at Japan. It's very convenient; I think this app might be perfect for you. It uses the standard handwriting of Japanese, with "Kakijun" as well.

This is a screenshot of it. (http://imgur.com/tKltojj)
You can also click the icon on upper right to enlarge the Kanji.