Here's mine. Just curious to see how mine compares to others. I'm sure the pens that I use aren't all that great which wouldn't help either.

I don't have a scanner, unfortunately, but I'm curious about something: are we supposed to write the hooks in pencil or does it apply only to brushes? Of course, for some kanji (such as zoo/mend) the stroke ending is important, but if you write eg. 月 or [kana]i[/kana], is it ok to drop the hook?

Here's mine, photoshopped to the nth degree to make the scan visible because I mostly like to write in pencil.

I write the hooks, although for ages I did I right angled ones until I twigged that was just evil Mincho messing me up again.

Ramchip Wrote:I don't have a scanner, unfortunately, but I'm curious about something: are we supposed to write the hooks in pencil or does it apply only to brushes? Of course, for some kanji (such as zoo/mend) the stroke ending is important, but if you write eg. 月 or [kana]i[/kana], is it ok to drop the hook?

My understanding is no, not really. Mincho is really not a good font to imitate though. Some handwritten fonts ignore things like stroke endings (stop/brush/etc), but hooks tend to persist. Many people do things like joining strokes together, most still write hooks.

Colonel32, I wish my writing was as neat as yours. Maybe I'll get over my embarassment and post some soon. In the meantime, I don't think I've seen this resource mentioned in the Forums:

The Yamasa online dictionary is almost unbearably slow, and somewhat limited in scope, but they have two nice features.

First, for many characters (possibly all [kana]jouyou[/kana]?), they have stroke order diagrams that actually show the direction the stroke is drawn in. This is occassionally not obvious from the traditional diagrams (although can be found other places, like JEDICT/EDICT).


Second, it has an actual handwriting sample for the same limited number of characters. I find this extremely interesting (if not totally useful).


You can look up kanji by cut and paste through their form interface (which, again, is unbearably slow and awkward), but an easier method is to find the Nelson index of the kanji (through one of the many online dictionaries), and then just sub it into the links below. So, for 漢, you can see from the WWWJDIC, the Nelson index is 2662. So, the stroke order diagram is at:

http://www.yamasa.cc/members%5Cocjs%5Cka...62_ani.gif

and the handwriting sample is at:

http://www.yamasa.cc/members%5Cocjs%5Cka...662_hw.gif

(if you get broken pages, you've looked up a kanji they don't have information for (yet?).

The full functionality (including some SuperMemo databases) is only available if you pay, but there's a fair bit available for free.

Interesting. Nice handwriting.
One other nice source that also gives stroke order and direction is http://kakijun.main.jp/

My handwriting looks awful, so I won't post it here unless I have done some more practice... that said, here is a link to a side I find sometimes helpful:

http://members.aol.com/rtdrpt/kanji/writutor.htm

My kanji writing is pretty appalling. While I do see some improvement over time, I really haven't spent any time tweaking the appearance of specific characters - I'm more focusing on properly arranging the primitives with respect to each other, and trying to make them fit into the square on the kanji paper I'm using.

When I compare my chicken scratchings to Gothic or Mincho text, the biggest flaw I see is my lack of resizing and distorting the primitives to make the character fit together elegantly - like the way the 貝 primitive can be wide 員 or skinny 貯, tall 狽 or short 貫.

I also have a tendency to separate the primitives too much, where printed examples would have the primitives closer, or even touching. For example, it's only recently that my 石 stopped being a free-standing cliff to the left of a free standing 口.

I'm wondering if people generally take time to really polish up the drawing of a character as they learn it, or just let your writing naturally mature from experience?

here's mine

edit: oh no, dead link...I'll have to re-upload

My writing's pretty bad because I never really practice, but anyway... this is done quickly on my fav new toy, my Tablet PC



Vista recognises my inking mess most of the time.

This thread is so cute <3 I love it. I want your tablet!!!

So you can all feel really good about your handwriting, here's an example of my chicken scratches.

http://bp0.blogger.com/_AFlLjulBSM8/R7wh...+r+047.JPG

Granted I spent a good bit of time to make the characters above look nice. I've actually gotten laughed at by some Chinese friends for having handwriting that looks like I'm in grade school. That's helped to push me into playing with 行書. At the very least it helps when trying to recognize other people's handwriting.

Wow scout you have great handwriting, did you get that just by practicing a lot or did you take any classes?

I'm looking to find a class to improve my handwriting.

I took Japanese classes for about two years, but they weren't specifically geared towards handwriting. One of my teachers' handwriting was really amazing. Kana in particular looked virtually identical to the 教科書 font. I basically decided that if she could do it, so could I.

There are definitely some strokes that I couldn't initially get to look nice for the life of me, but I've found that over time it just happens. A big part of it is just the decision to pay attention to small details. We learned a few rules in class that really helped me to understand what I should be trying to pay attention to. Here are the ones I remember off the top of my head:
1) Keep vertical strokes vertical. Horizontal strokes can be slanted.
2) Almost no horizontal strokes are straight. They usually dip down quickly then slowly come up, level off and then drop a bit.
3) The ending of the last stroke in characters like 飲 shouldn't be ignored. It's achieved by a short pause and then a flick of the wrist to end the stroke. Over time it becomes natural.

Beyond that, I keep looking for sources of native handwriting and copying the parts that look attractive to me. Watching 東京湾景 changed the way I write 田 forever. (One of the characters in the drama did caligraphy and I found his way of writing it absolutely beautiful.)

Wow scout, I'm really in awe of your writing.
Towards the end of Heisig I started to alter my writing, making vertical strokes a little less 'blocky' and more fluid and slanted ever so slightly.

Any chance you could show us how you write 田?

Hopefully it's not too much of a letdown after the previous image .. but here is a raw, unedited page of what I've been writing out while going through the book:
http://scoutsghost.googlepages.com/heisig-practice.jpg

For a good number of those characters, you're seeing the first time I've ever tried writing them. I absolutely agree with Heisig that writing the characters doesn't get you to memorize them, so I generally just try writing them until they feel reasonably balanaced. I've found writing them out with a pen during later reviews to be too painful, so for those I write them in the air.

The best example of 田 is on the second line of #28, the 2nd in. (The one by itself.) The 2nd stroke is the most changed -- it's curved and doesn't meet the 1st stroke at the top. Similar changes happen to the house and crown primitives. Other good examples of playing with the forms are 石 in the first one in #10 and 土 in the 2nd and 3rd ones for #14.

A lot of these alternate forms come from 行書 and 草書. Both have a certain amount of controlled wildness to them that I find aesthetically pleasing. Personally, I'm still working on being able to write similarly to how the person writes during the opening to the first season of Hana yori Dango.

I actually use a couple of Sailor Profit brush pens to write out the kanji as I'm drilling myself. I've gone though about 200+ pages of paper, crammed full of kanji, and about 20 ink cartridges with the brush pens. A brush pen is not the same as a proper calligraphy brush, but it's fun to use anyway (tho it is pretty unforgiving in comparison). I find it helps me to focus on the character a bit... but yeah, I don't think it helps with retention rates all that much.

I've been taking calligraphy classes for about 2 years now--I started doing it to help me focus on kanji some, but it didn't help nearly as much as RTK has. I'd like to study Japanese calligraphy, but I haven't found anyone around here that teaches it. Either way, I enjoy going to classes. It's a once every 2 weeks sort of thing, but it's very relaxing.

I think I posted a couple of books on Japanese calligraphy I picked up at the National Museum shop in Tokyo. Here they are again, just in case I didn't:

Brush Writing: Calligraphy Techniques for Beginners by Ryokushuu Kuiseko ISBN: 4-7700-1362-0 runs about 2900 yen. Great book, if a little short. She has some beautiful brushwork, too.

Sho: Japanese Calligraphy by Christopher J. Earnshaw ISBN: 0-8048-1568-2 runs about $25 US. Not as good as the first, but has a lot of info. The spine is waaay too stiff.

Someday I'll post my pictures, when I can find someplace to put them.

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.

Wow, I missed quite some recent and very interesting posts here.

@scout
I really think your handwriting looks amazing, I'd be happy if mine would be a bit more like yours. Could you by any chance explain a bit more what you meant by the 3rd caligraphy point, since I don't understand at all, how one could ignore the last stroke?
"3) The ending of the last stroke in characters like 飲 shouldn't be ignored. It's achieved by a short pause and then a flick of the wrist to end the stroke. Over time it becomes natural."

@splice42
Thanks a lot for the mentioning, and thorough review, of those books. They do sound like the kind of books I'm looking for to start working on my handwriting. And since my knowledge of Japanese is currently still round nil those links and reviews are very much appreciated.
Do you think you could show specific example for the different styles described in the two first books, since "...the second is a more cursive font but not 行書." is a bit too vague for me. That would be great.

Yes, I am considering posting some samples tonight. It's hard to explain how a yawaraka kaisho font differs from gyosho but once you see it it makes sense. You could say that gyosho is a semi-cursive font, kaisho is block font, and a yawaraka kaisho is a more rounded, looser block font with some semi-cursive thrown in sometimes.

Anyway I will see what I can do tonight.

If you can get a copy of RTK1 3rd ed., all of the characters are written by hand by calligrapher Furuhashi Mine which show a great example of true "Japanese-style" handwriting. I was lucky enough to pick up a copy from the library last year and xeroxed the "hand-drawn characters" index from the glossary for at-home reference.

It's not necissarily important to have "Japanese-style" handwriting but I have heard comments like "that handwriting is 'not from Japan'", or "a Japanese person didn't write that", etc., about other's handwriting.

@Biene
I've been trying to find the right word for the kind of stroke that I'm referring to, but haven't had much luck. I'm referring to the strokes that have a "stop" when written with a brush where the end of the stroke becomes thicker. The last strokes of 道, 飲 and 大 are good examples of this. With a pen you really can't make the stroke thicker, so this type of ending comes out differently. (Refer to my picture above and note how the last stroke in 飲 doesn't come out entirely straight.)

@splice42
I guess I've basically been adopting some of the 行書 forms -- 草書 still boggles me. After seeing the kanji poster linked to from the main page, I decided to make up my own using one of the free Epson 行書 fonts. There are a lot of characters that I wouldn't instantly recognize, but by seeing them in context (the poster is in the order of the book) I can piece together what I'm seeing. I think more than anything I just need to get familiar with seeing the alternate forms.

This site has lots of good illustrations on the differences between 楷書 and 行書:
http://daigotorena.moo.jp/lesson/bushubetsu-menu.htm

@stehr
Did Furuhashi Mine only do the 3rd edition? The first edition also has handwritten characters, but I've been under the impression that they were done by Heisig.

scout Wrote:Did Furuhashi Mine only do the 3rd edition? The first edition also has handwritten characters, but I've been under the impression that they were done by Heisig.

I'm not sure, I have never seen an edition earlier than the 3rd. According to the acknowledgements on the last page of my 3rd ed., I assume she penned the characters for both 2nd and 3rd editions.

@scout, thanks so much for that nice site. I will be studying it for sure. I had the same idea as you for the kanji poster; the one offered isn't to my taste, but since I have a number of nice fonts, I may end up doing one of my own with different typefaces on it. Maybe some 楷書 with some 行書 and maybe even 草書 in fainter type to the side, if I can finally track down a 草書 font that's worth it (only demos right now).

Sorry I didn't get to post the images last Friday. Will try to do that tonight.

@stehr, there are issues with the "handwritten" characters in RTK. The first one is that the kanji are obviously written with a brush. A pen will give a totally different feeling and it seems to me that the balance would be harder to achieve when you cannot vary the line width. The second issue is that if you base your writing on what's in the book, you're basically following a monkey-see monkey-do approach. You will have little conscious understanding of the balance of characters, how the spacing between elements works, etc. I just hope that you're very good at imitating the characters because otherwise it's easy to miss one or two small details and write the character badly. Not to mention that stroke direction is not indicated for the most part. For example, 手へん's third stroke is from the bottom up, left to right, kind of like a continuation of the hane at the bottom of the second stroke. I had no idea until I looked through my books, and now that I know this my character looks much better than it did previously.

Anyway I hope to post some more later.