alyks Wrote:When I try and write kanji left handed (ambidextrous), they all suddenly get really ugly.

I may be wrong, but I think the 'official' stroke order is more suitable for right handed people.

My 女 and 糸 look horrible when used as primitives at the bottom of a character.

Yeah, writing always is biased to righties. I looked around for any resources on left handed writing, but couldn't find any. Anybody know of any?

For some reason I can never write 器 correctly >_<
I can never line the boxes up correctly no matter how hard I try T^T
it just kinda looks like a jumbled mess,
but my handwriting is atrocious anyways.
I seem to always kill the beauty of kanji XD
but i'm practicing ^.^;;

It ain't right, I tell ye. It ain't right.

*Contemplates them words for a moment*

*tries to write kanji with right hand*

Ohhhhhhhhhhh

Yeah, anything with 言 on the bottom is nigh impossible to write well (those kanji always end up looking either absurdly tall or just like a big blob of lines). If I take it slowly I can generally get a kanji looking decent, but stuff with 言 at the bottom, not so much.

Ditto for characters with a lot of primitives lined up horizontally. They usually end up really wide for me. Like 雌 and stuff. 95% of the time they come out horribly wide. D:

I found the best place where the aesthetics of my Kanji improved was when I was using かきとり on my DS. I liked how it was nice and picky with stroke order, direction, and position.

I haven't used it in a while so I'm pretty good with grade 1 Kanji (子 and 花 look decent in my hand I believe) but it really comes down to whether or not I've written the kanji lots of times.
I know writing over and over and over isn't great for memorisation, but I've found no better tool for improving the aesthetics of my writing (both in English and Japanese)

Omnistegan Wrote:I found the best place where the aesthetics of my Kanji improved was when I was using かきとり on my DS. I liked how it was nice and picky with stroke order, direction, and position.

I haven't used it in a while so I'm pretty good with grade 1 Kanji (子 and 花 look decent in my hand I believe) but it really comes down to whether or not I've written the kanji lots of times.
I know writing over and over and over isn't great for memorisation, but I've found no better tool for improving the aesthetics of my writing (both in English and Japanese)

I have found かきとり to be pretty lax in regards to stroke order, and the grading is pretty hit and miss. You should get one of the softs that is specifically meant to teach you how to write the kanji well, instead of a soft that has that feature in additional to the (main) feature of teaching you the kanji.

kaoskastle Wrote:Ditto for characters with a lot of primitives lined up horizontally. They usually end up really wide for me.

Thing about those is that if you're writing vertically even an overwide one of those isn't going to be misreadable as two separate kanji; but of course the modern trend is to horizontal writing. Not that it's a serious problem, but I do wonder if there would have been fewer horizontally-aligned type kanji if the Chinese had traditionally written horizontally...

Waaaaaa, I just *guessed* the right stroke order for the turkey primitive. Not sure this belongs in here but heh, I wanted to share. A little success story for me. Heisig says that the "writing is somewhat peculiar" so I tried to guess it before looking at the stroke order and got it right. I win! looks like you do get a feel for the stroke order over time...

(sorry guys, had to rant this out somewhere) o.O

Anything with that bastard "road" radical

Machine_Gun_Cat Wrote:Anything with that bastard "road" radical

In the beginning it was a hard radical for me too, but then I got the "schwung" of it, and it looks rather nice and curve now don't think too much

Ｉ　ｃａｎ　ｎｅｖｅｒ　ｗｒｉｔｅ　影　ｐｒｏｐｅｒｌｙ．　Ｍｙ　成　and kanji like it usually look like crap as well.

Machine_Gun_Cat Wrote:Anything with that bastard "road" radical

Good grief, yes. I forgot about that one. Ugh. It's even worse than "stretch out".
Basically, anything that arcs under another primitive like that ("road", "stretch out", sometimes 走, etc.) most of the time ends up too wide for me. I need to print out some graph paper and practice my handwriting in that...

It gave me a lot of trouble when I was starting out and ignored stroke order, but the fact that it's written after everything on top of it makes it pretty easy (for me at least) to get the width right.

~J

Overall, I think my kanji look pretty good, but I still trip up on simple primitives like 女 and　攵. Those annoy the heck outta me! They just don't look quite "right".

I'm pretty good at writing most kanji, including ones like 警. I'm not so great at the road primitive though. That's the one thing.

I like writing 水 and 興 best. I make them look good. Plus the former is beautiful, and the latter looks like a road to a city, so I like them.

Someone posted the kanji for the keyword "entertain" earlier, commenting on the difficulty. Funnily enough from the first time I ever saw said kanji it has never been an issue. Almost instantly one of the most pleasing kanji to write for my experience. Some of those ones with "taskmaster" squashed into the right side, however... *mutters something which would even offend the most Parisian man*.

It's a bit daft that I'm even mildly indignant about the terrible state of my kanji-writing, considering as how my cursive deteriorated into cheerfully louche cryptography sometime in middle adolescence and considering that I now regard a keyboard, ANY keyboard, as a prosthetic appliance.

I hear y'all on those stacked ones, oh yes. Mine always look like a kid teetering on Mum's high heels, or something.

I found this quite surprising! I find 女 and 攵 to be of the more beautiful Kanji, especially the former. And despite having certain proportions that need to be written appropriately to look right, I find them intuitive to write and come easy to the hand, whether above, below or at the side of other elements!

BTW 女 is my favorite Kanji, not because of the meaning -_-;, but because of the abstraction and curves it has.

[Zgarbas]

I also make my complicated kanjis too tall, but I write vertically so it's not big.
Except on exams, where I have to write horizontally. The disproportion hurts >.<.

I really dislike 言 as a simple kanji or as a bottom radical, and the same goes for 糸. Being so used to having it as a left-side radical I've started writing them to fit a left-side radical spot....They're always waaaaay too narrow and get disproportioned, but if I write them correctly it looks/feels very wrong.

[s0apgun]

alyks's avatar cracks my shit up

just sayin

I do have a tendency to make many of my kanji a bit tall and spindly, rather than fit into a box like it "should". So my 木　will end up much like a 't' with a couple of short legs, for instance.

Oh I just remembered when I tried to do my RTK reviews on square-marked paper, it was extremely frustrating to write (maybe draw?) Kanji in the totally correct proportions, so I discarded that

You know, I've just tried the squared-paper tip (swiped a maths grid book from one of the kids, a win for us both) and I reckon it's *gold* - it's an interesting exercise to try to keep the proportions true in both a supersize version (2 x 2 7mm squares, and man, that kind of scale lays your style bare) and a more normal writing size (a single 7mm square).

For me, I should have been doing this all along! Mileage will vary, though, here as in all things.