My kanjis come out ugly on paper when trying to writing to good quality, and also find it very time consuming writing the kanji all over until it looks good. The stroke order however is less time consuming, and i usually don't have to write it more than once to remember it too.

If you guys want, i can take pictures of my writings of the kanjis so you guys can see how bad they look.

It can be worth remembering the stroke order, since it helps with dictionaries and maybe for times you actually want to write the characters, but I wouldn't bother with practicing for better-looking characters, personally. It's not that critical in this computer age.

I would say that you don’t need to worry about your kanji not looking good now (and I’m saying this based on my own experience). There are two things that I found important in writing practice. 1) Being able to write primitives with correct stroke order (from this it follows that your kanji will come out correct stroke-wise as well) and 2) finding/getting wright proportions/balance between primitives within the character. The rest will be taken care off by reviews and with time, given that you pay attention to those two things I mentioned, your characters should start looking ok. There is no need to overdo writing practice at the very first time.

Ahh, one more thing, get yourself a nice looking font that you can use as an example for good looking characters. I’m using freely available Epson’s fonts.

Inny Jan Wrote:I would say that you don’t need to worry about your kanji not looking good now (and I’m saying this based on my own experience). There are two things that I found important in writing practice. 1) Being able to write primitives with correct stroke order (from this it follows that your kanji will come out correct stroke-wise as well) and 2) finding/getting wright proportions/balance between primitives within the character. The rest will be taken care off by reviews and with time, given that you pay attention to those two things I mentioned, your characters should start looking ok. There is no need to overdo writing practice at the very first time.

Ahh, one more thing, get yourself a nice looking font that you can use as an example for good looking characters. I’m using freely available Epson’s fonts.

I don't understand the second thing. What do you mean by getting the right balance for writing kanji(is that at a later stage)?

What's wrong with Heisig's writing?

Quote:I don't understand the second thing. What do you mean by getting the right balance for writing kanji(is that at a later stage)?

Take the sun/day primitive (日) as an example. This primitive appears in many characters, for example:
昨、音、者、照
You need to know/feel what is the correct position and size of 日 in each of these characters. Only when all the primitives are in the right places and have the right size, you can say that the kanji is well balanced. If not, the character will look odd.

Quote:What's wrong with Heisig's writing?

Heisig, in his book, when introducing characters, uses font that is not meant for to be used as an example for handwriting. For that you need to refer either to one of the appendixes in the book (can’t remember which one), or find a font that shows handwritten form of the characters.

Stroke order and writing quality is very important. If you ever intending taking any level of the Kanken, it is an imperative to write correctly. If you ever take Japanese at a university, you'd be constantly corrected if you didn't. It's not like stroke order is random. It's quite systematic, and as Inny Jan gets at, Kanji can look quite odd when there isn't balanced to it. Some Kanji are so close that a mess up could be costly. For instance, 日 VS 曰
Let's not forget some of the Kana that are so close like シ & ツ. You're handwriting doesn't have to be perfect, but if you can get it to look anything like the stroke order demonstrates on jisho.org, which are pretty useful, then you should be fine.

This site is also pretty good for seeing handwritten examples of the kanji:

http://www.yamasa.cc/ocjs/kanjidic.nsf/S...3?OpenForm

It unfortunately only has look up capabilities for the jouyou kanji available though

Thanks for the replies. I'm not planning on taking Kanken or anything. I just want to remember the kanjis, and i'm hoping that my bad writing doesn't make it a problem for remembering them. I will spent some time on writing them if they look unbalance thanks for the explanations.

As for the handwritten kanji fonts, are there any books available that have those?

Forthem, thanks for the website. I will check it out.

You might also find this post interesting.

http://japaneselevelup.com/2011/02/11/wr...forgotten/

PS and this http://japaneselevelup.com/2011/09/11/le...d-skip-it/

(yeah I'm a bit of a JALUP junkie lately)

I'm going to weigh in on the side of Don't worry about it.

I write kanji every day at work, without minding much about the stroke order or how the characters look, and nobody seems to care. It's the same in English--my writing looks terrible. I doubt that even if I spent months trying to improve my penmanship, it would have little effect at this age.

Also, you should know that some Japanese people have amazingly bad handwriting, while other folk's is wonderful. Just like any other language.

Now, that being said, it doesn't mean that stroke order isn't important, since it does help you form the characters correctly, and look them up in electronic dictionaries. The basics are easy enough to learn. But beyond that, whether you write the ninth stroke before the tenth, few people will notice or care. Personally, I wouldn't invest the time beyond the basics, but that's just me.

Well, we all know the important is to remember every Kanji and be able to write them all too. If you can recognize the Kanji you drew, there is no problem. Where there are problems, however, is on Kanji that look similar. For example, the kanji 末 and 未 only have the first two stroke lengths different, so you have to watch out when drawing them.

Once you have finished learning the Kanji, you can try to get better at drawing them. Maybe you'll naturally have gotten better at drawing them and may not feel the need to improve. But remains that writing quality is secondary and should not be prioritized over your main objective: remembering every Kanji.