The handwriting of my Japanese friends was impeccable. I hardly ever saw them write it quickly and hurriedly. It was really legible and easy to understand - that's compared to some of the teachers I had. I had trouble deciphering some of their scribbles Mind you I was studying at a university of education, so that maybe why they all wrote so neatly. Kinda like how primary school teacher's have to write their letters all the same way when they write on the blackboard.

へー and i was gonna say, if you've ever seen japanese people's handwriting, you shouldn't worry. whenever someone tried to write down something for me, it was totally illegible...

yeah, your handwriting was totally legible to me, except for 飾り, it took me over 5 seconds to realise what it was. If you're worried, you could try and find a nice handwriting style, and get some tracing paper and just trace it a lot of times til you've got the muscle memory down...

Like Seamoby. I'd also like to see some native written examples for the sentenses arch9443 posted. Maybe some of you could ask your spouses, girl-/boyfriends, collegues, friends, students etc. for written examples? So that we could get an idea how natives (teenagers, women and men in their 20's, 30's, etc.) would write theses sentenses? Not in overneat writing style, but how they'd write a legible note/letter. That would be very helpful, to illustrate the comments already given.

Appart from that, here is my attempt on handwriting, a bit shaky and not in an overly neat way but quite legible... I'd say. I'm looking forward to the comments, as I have no idea what impression it gives. ;P

http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/827/textcopya.jpg/

I agree in that your handwriting looks like a 7-years old but you surely improve the more you write. I have met Japanese with such a beautiful handwriting both in kanji AND in romaji that makes me feel envious. I have also met Japanese who write in such illegible way that not even they can understand it later. And as anyone, Japanese also write more or less neatly depending on the situation. No Japanese would go far writing a work resume (the infamous 履歴書) with that handwriting but if it is legible, it shouldnt be a problem in case of foreigners. A piece of advise: Be careful to write kanji like if each one occupies the same squared space: Your 館 looks almost like 食官.

By the way, I find interesting to know which characters are more difficult to write for foreigners. I think it really changes for each one. In my case, the following are the most problematic:
れ
せ
が　(have already a 点, when I write the other two, it looks utterly crowded)
そ
シ (natives have told me I write it too similar to ツ)

when it comes to kanjis, I always have problems with:
心,必 In my opinion, these two are among the most horrible kanjis.
官, like in 追加、食管, etc;
糸, when it appears in bottom position like in 紫、素, because I cannot make it fit neatly
丸 in "dense" kanjis like 熱、勢、執

Here is my own sample of bad gaijin handwriting. All natural and on the fly and really didn't know how to write 秘密 without stopping to double check. And it still came out nasty.

http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3520/5842...c18a_b.jpg

and my う looks like a ラ

arch9443 Wrote:It's hard to know what's natural when pretty much the only thing I have constant exposure to is computer fonts. I look up kanji in JDIC to get at least a bit better of an idea of how they should look handwritten. But I've pretty much never seen handwritten kana besides my own.

The versions in 'Remembering the Kana' are pretty much exactly perfect. Maybe go back to the book and go through it again. I believe RtKana also has a cursive version on each page, but ignore these, learn the basic forms properly first!

As for practising, you can get hiragana practise papers online. A quick google threw up this:

http://japanese-lesson.com/characters/hi...iting.html

How many more people are gonna write 寿司室...?

nadiatims Wrote:How many more people are gonna write 寿司室...?

Opps

kitakitsune Wrote:

nadiatims Wrote:How many more people are gonna write 寿司室...?

Opps

Opps indeed... *cough*

Didn't notice at all.

My writing is about the same. Just keep practicing and it will get better. All part of the learning process.

caivano Wrote:The で with the tenten inside is fine. I have some good samples of handwriting and about half of them do で with the tenten inside. There are a ton of handwriting styles so you don't need to be so anal about specifics but still, what looks good looks good.

Like others have said it's legible but not good. If I was going to be writing a lot when reviewing, I would make sure I knew how to write well first, using the kanji practice books for Japanese kids. So then you know what you're aiming for.

Concerning the tenten: what I found great is my girlfriends hand writing. I really liked it, and having a neat and clean writing script is really important for me to have, since it kind of described my character. I hate people not being able to write properly and other people have to request a cryptographist or something similar. Anyway, but the best thing to happen to you is imitating a native-handwriting. I asked her to write down all kana in her handwriting with a diversity of pens (thick/thin/ultra-thin) and copied it simply. (With Kanji is was slightly difficult, right? I asked her to write down the most common radicals instead.) And coming back to the tenten, mine looks different as well

Perfectly legible, man~

Having the さ and き connected is also good and superior.

Edit: Make sure to lighten pressure a bit, though, when connecting.

nest0r Wrote:Having the さ and き connected is also good and superior.

What makes you say that? I think unconnected looks far nicer.

I think that my handwriting is pretty neat. In fact, I think my handwritten Japanese is much neater than the chicken scratches that I scribble in English. However, my handwriting didn't start off this neat. I think that the most helpful thing in improving Japanese handwriting is stroke order. I actually went back and relearned a lot of the stroke orders for my kana, and it has helped immensely.

http://i.imgur.com/DR5ym.jpg

Regarding the OP's handwriting: sure it's legible, but like nadiatims mentioned, it's legible the way that a kindergartner's handwriting is "legible" or that an ESL student who's learned English for a few months is "comprehensible." You'll get the meaning across, but it will look sloppy.

@arch9442: Also, it may not simply be a Japanese handwriting issue. How's your English/native language handwriting? I mention this because even the まる at the end of your sentences look a little strange/disproportionate.

thecite Wrote:

nest0r Wrote:Having the さ and き connected is also good and superior.

What makes you say that? I think unconnected looks far nicer.

I would say... It's more natural for writing and to the kana in question, looks better, is very common & easy to read, lends itself to being unconnected should you choose to lighten the pressure that extra bit, and personally I think the fewer disconnected parts in kana, letters, &c., the better. (Highly symmetrical or asymmetrical elements such as い, and diacritics excepted.)

Edit: ら is another one I tend to connect. (Thankful again that my tm2 is pressure sensitive now that I've switched to paperless.)

@arch9442: Personally I only ever used lined paper (e.g. college ruled) to write the bulk of my Japanese during my illustrious handwriting career with paper, and quite liked it and often used those lines especially when I started writing smaller and in lengthier segments (I didn't force myself to write within them when I started) but I thought perhaps you needed the added constraints to develop your spatial awareness of individual graphemes before moving on to ensuring they all flow together in a consistent manner in less constrained ways.

my handwriting, if i go at マイペース:
http://i.imgur.com/tNSaf.jpg

my regular english handwriting sucks. =)
そ with the drop or without is acceptable either way.

i definitely have trouble with the radical on the left side of 院, 際

Since everyone's doing it, here's my attempt:
http://i5.photobucket.com/albums/y158/ch...riting.jpg
I used a gel pen and wrote fairly quickly so it's not the best I can do (I snuck a Chinese simplified character in there, which I often do writing for myself).

Might be skewed a bit because I was writing it specifically to post it; maybe some writing I already did for other purposes would look different.

Here is something I did earlier. I'm going back over the basics with japanesepod101 and I was writing sample sentences to put into a anki deck.

http://i.imgur.com/Wu0jy.jpg

nest0r Wrote:@arch9442: Personally I only ever used lined paper (e.g. college ruled) to write the bulk of my Japanese during my illustrious handwriting career with paper, and quite liked it and often used those lines especially when I started writing smaller and in lengthier segments (I didn't force myself to write within them when I started) but I thought perhaps you needed the added constraints to develop your spatial awareness of individual graphemes before moving on to ensuring they all flow together in a consistent manner in less constrained ways.

Yeah and I agree with that. It would probably be helpful, because right now I just kinda write things as wide as I want. lol.


Thanks for all the responses. I think it's kinda funny that a few people wrote 寿司室 just because I was an idiot. >.<

If my writing looks like that of a 7 year old then I think that's not to bad as I've had like 3 months of writing practice. I certainly wasn't expecting people to say my writing is good. I just wanted to know if it could be read at all.

tylerdevlin Wrote:@arch9442: Also, it may not simply be a Japanese handwriting issue. How's your English/native language handwriting? I mention this because even the まる at the end of your sentences look a little strange/disproportionate.

I've always thought my handwriting was pretty bad in English as well. But handwriting isn't even taken very seriously in the states, and I've never really cared. It's not like anyone here reads handwriting anymore except for the people who write it. There's at least a bit more of a reason for me to want to write nicely in Japan, because I'll need to make a resume and stuff like that. I've never worked on handwriting before now, honestly.

I quickly browsed through the remembering the Kana books again, and made a hiragana and katakana chart. The only kana I was actually screwing up stroke order on was な I always wrote the swirly thing before the dot. I wrote さ　き and り the more normal way. I think I do like them better connected, but I'll try and wait till that happens naturally.

I'm still fairly uncomfortable with writing Katakana.

http://i.imgur.com/E7RbP.jpg

I totally wrote ソ and ン backwards. I haven't done that in a long time. >.<

This is a morbid learning tool and even more tragic to factor in the circumstances in which the notes were written, but finding many samples of common handwritten native Japanese seems rather difficult to find online, so: http://cdn.theatlantic.com/static/infocu...R2JSYW.jpg

Source: http://www.theatlantic.com/infocus/2011/...023/#img11

nest0r Wrote:

thecite Wrote:

nest0r Wrote:Having the さ and き connected is also good and superior.

What makes you say that? I think unconnected looks far nicer.

I would say... It's more natural for writing and to the kana in question, looks better, is very common & easy to read

I don't think it's very common... having them unconnected is way more common anyway, and looks better imo.

Tokyo Graffiti is a magazine which has a lot of handwriting in it. Although it is done on a whiteboard. Still, it's really useful.

This is the only version of it I can find online, but usually people answer a question like いちばん心にの残っている言葉は？ rather than talking about a boatrace -> http://www.boatrace.jp/enjoy/voice/graffiti/index.html

http://imgur.com/e2kuu

the tv show thing i was talking abt.

whited out part is へんと

nest0r Wrote:This is a morbid learning tool and even more tragic to factor in the circumstances in which the notes were written, but finding many samples of common handwritten native Japanese seems rather difficult to find online, so: http://cdn.theatlantic.com/static/infocu...R2JSYW.jpg

Source: http://www.theatlantic.com/infocus/2011/...023/#img11

Oh, that reminded me---Google has a Picasa album of shelter lists. Lots of handwritten samples there:

https://picasaweb.google.com/tohoku.anpi