splice4 Wrote:I recently picked up a few nice books that are sure to help with handwriting for Japanese.

ボールペン字書き込み練習帳　(Writing characters with a ball pen Workbook)

This book takes you through Hiragana, Katakana, Kanji and the western alphabet. The style used is block script (kaisho). You can take a look inside the book using Amazon's feature on the page above. For every character, there is a model to follow and a few squares to practice with. The first practice square has a soft outline of the character to trace over, the others are blank. I highly recommend making photocopies and using those for practice. The squares have guides which split it in 4 smaller squares making it easier to see the balance of the characters. There are a few notes indicating particular points for each character (ie "this aligns on the left", "this is smaller", "these strokes do not touch", etc) which can be very useful. There are also small guide lines and circles indicating the appropriate amount of space between components, how the character aligns and so on.

The book first takes through single Hiragana characters, then combinations written horizontally and vertically. This helps you see how the spacing and sizing of characters works in practice. This is followed by the same process for katakana characters. Both the alphabets take up about a sixth of the book.

The rest of the workbook is mostly dedicated to kanji. The first part takes you through a variety of radicals which you practice through a few characters containing it. The model is the same as previous, with an example of the character, a practice square with a faint outline, and a blank square. There are 94 different radicals to practice, each with 3-4 characters. Following this are kanji compounds written vertically and horizontally.

After the kanji come arabic numerals, with practice sheets for plain numerals, dates, japanese numbers and so on. A few pages of western alphabet practice follow. Finally there are a number of worksheets to practice writing sentences, paragraphs, and there are even models of letters, envelopes, business cards and even a resume. 127 pages.

やわらか楷書」で書くペン字練習帳―書き込み式 (Writing soft block script characters with a ball pen Workbook

This is a similar book, but it instead takes you through a more cursive script (yawaraka kaisho). It is a very similar in format to the previous book. You will see hiragana, katana, kanji, western alphabet, and models for letters, envelopes, and so on. The kanji section is arranged slightly differently; you first see the 8 different types of strokes, illustrated by that old standby of calligraphy students, ei/永. Then there are a few characters to practice for each type of stroke. Following that, there are worksheets dedicated to radicals, 71 different radicals in all. The rest is very much like the previous book, with kanji compounds of increasing length, written horizontally and vertically.

There is also some talk of brush strokes and even some brush practice at the back.

I also have two other books, one covering brush pen only and another mostly dedicated to templates and with a short section on gyosho. All in all I believe the two above are the best for people who would like to improve their handwriting without going to calligraphy classes, which may mostly be focused on brush and art rather than pens and day-to-day writing.

As for the diference between scripts, there are three main families: kaisho/楷書, gyosho/行書 and sousho/草書. The two books above fall in the 楷書 category; the second is a more cursive font but not 行書.

I really like scout's writing, although if the books I have are any basis, none of it is 草書. Some transformations that happen with that script are mindboggling. I may post some pictures later.

Biene Wrote:Let's start a new thread on books or links that might help with improving ones kanji/kana handwriting.

Splic42 posted two nice reviews in this thread:

Tourne Wrote:Sadly when ordering from Amazon.co.jp, the postage is 3 times the cost of the books! sad