I think everyone must have their own kanji-writing idiosyncrasies. What's yours?

Here's mine: my flower radical is always huge. It takes up at least a third of the frame and I can never fit everything under it.

When the 言 primitive comes on the bottom of a kanji, the kanji always look horrendous.

My kanji with several primitives stacked in columns always end up a bit wider than they are tall.

My "pack of wild dogs" always looks terrible or like the hand primitive, and I can't for the life of me draw the kanji for building block I think it is.

My pinnacles and city walls look like Bs ._.

My road looks like a road through beer-goggles.

My 女 is always weird.
Can't really do the right stroke order for 必.

"Small kanji" (just the ones you have to draw big because they have only 1 or 2 primitives... like 本 or 人) are too small all the time, and when I have to write something like ... well something with more 'parts' it always ends up way too big, sometimes taking up the space of two kanji and therefore are hard to read (ehm, 'does this belong together as 1 kanji, or are it 2?")　...

It's a little easier when I'm writing in a notebook with squares but those are so big it takes a lot of space to write anything and ... well they're just too big.

Not kanji but ehm, I can't get the ら to look correct, whatever I do. I also have some trouble with せ ... After a freaking year of daily writing my review sentences down. (I think by now, I've gotten used to this way of making ら　and せ look as horrible as they do... I can't get them to look right. AH) ...

And on my DS dictionary, I can't draw え and get it to recognize it - it's the only kana I have to click on in the list whenever I want to enter it.

[Katsuo]

zdude255 Wrote:Can't really do the right stroke order for 必.

So (ソ) you invariably get it wrong?

Just notice that it starts with a (distorted) katakana "so" (ソ) followed by fishhook. The final two drops obey the standard left-to-right rule.

Oh, and for me, the kanji that is most difficult to write attractively is 飛.

女 can be easier if you remember it as one of the more amusing puns built into the Japanese language,　くのいち, the female ninja. く　ノ　一. The く can use some playing around with, but you can pretty much just slap those characters right on top of each other to make a pretty attractive character, as long as you can write the other three attractively - it's even in the right stroke order. It'd also be a good mnemonic if the character was difficult to remember at all...

I knew there was one kanji I always did terribly, but I couldn't remember before. It's 雨 whenever it appears as a primitive. By itself it's quite attractive, but in any compound I just butcher the thing. It's the single most unattractive component I draw. Unrelatedly, I have too much fun drawing the hiragana な.

My 'say' primitives look deformed.

its the road kanji that gets me and the 必 remembering the steps for it gets me also they make you go all over the place when writing invariably was it? and and whats another one??? im sure there are others just can't think of it..... o well.

My road primitive is always woah what the hell is that thing. Kill it! KILL.... IT!

kazelee Wrote:My road primitive is always woah what the hell is that thing. Kill it! KILL.... IT!

Exactly the same for me

I would recommend trying some books on Chinese calligraphy. Plus lots and lots of practice.

I've found some useful books on Chinese calligraphy at my local library. Once you get a feel for how the strokes are put together, how you stress them, how you space the primitives and scale them to fit into the square, then it's a matter of lots of practice until the characters start looking right.

With hiragana, I find it useful learning the kanji from which they are derived. It makes a huge difference in your understanding of how to write them. For example, you can understand how あ, す and お differ in shape and why in spite of superficial similarity, they are each written very different.

I used to be much better at writing kanji when I lived in Japan and wrote every day... so many of my "wtf, this looks horrible" comes from me comparing to how I wrote before... But yeah, I've always had some problems. The brush primitive in 書く for example... I ALWAYS write it too tall, I never learned to write it compact enough.

Everything using the helmet primitive inside another primitive also becomes too big. 週 for example. I also never learned to write 園 small enough.

If you have a look at the etymology for 必 you'll understand why the stroke order is the way it is .

I was so fascinated by that character that i don't use a story for it, it is a rote learned one along with the etymology behind it.

My 糸's are always really ugly.

QuackingShoe Wrote:Unrelatedly, I have too much fun drawing the hiragana な.

It looks like a man in midair, jumping onto the horn of a curly tailed narwhal that's launching his horn at the man.

Or maybe a ナjumping onto the narwhal.

Maybe ひらがな are just cooler than カタカナ... but the ナ can't join the super cool ひらがな club until he passes his initiation... Jumping onto a horn-launching narwhal.

[looking above, we can see the interesting effects doing RTK has had on my imaginative memory]

donbert Wrote:My pinnacles and city walls look like Bs ._.

An interesting story for the kanji 阿[africa] goes as follows: It looks like BOTswana -- an African country!

来る

looking at it now though, I think it's because I　always drew the horizontal lines at the same length.

Oh, and like Tobb, I often royally Mess up 書く。　Horizontal strokes are the hardest for me.　Especially floating ones that don't really have an anchor like in 書く。