So I've been writing down core 2k sentences for quite a while now. In anki I have 3 types of cards for each vocab word. One where it shows the word in Kanji and the Kana/Translation on the back with audio. One where it shows the Sentence in Kanji on front, and has the Kana/translation and audio on the back. And the final one where the front just has the audio with the word "listen", and back has the sentence in Kanji and Kana and the translation. I've been writing sentences every single time one of the "listen" cards comes up, but I'm not sure if I should change some of my writing habits before continuing.

Here's a few sentences(as many as my phone could fit comfortably on the screen at once), and I was wondering if anything in these sentences sticks out with my handrwiting as needs major improvement.

http://i.imgur.com/ggQy4.jpg

Sorry that the picture is a bit blurry, taking a decent picture with my phone is rather difficult, and my actual camera is even worse >.< Any constructive criticism is appreciated.

In general, it kind of looks like it was written by a little kid. But you know, it takes some practice to get some flow.

階 and 飾 both are separated too much from the left part to the right.

屋, 密, and 運 also look pretty funky.

Your す looks like your よ. ;p Your の looks like it was drawn by Dali. Edit: The 。 could be a bit smaller, also.

I think writing the whole sentence and writing for every review is overkill, personally; just pick periodic segments, be it words or words + particles, or phrases that stand out, etc.

Also, give yourself some space and time when you're writing; speed and robustness of your ability to write different sizes and such will derive from this. Have you thought about using those 原稿用紙 sheets?

For my ‘listen’ cards (video clip only) I don't actually do any writing, I leave the writing for when I'm studying words/sentences elsewhere as a kind of supplement.

Tzadeck Wrote:階 and 飾 both are separated too much from the left part to the right.
.

actually I saw on some tv show (japanese) about handwriting assessment (whatever that's called where they judge your personality from stuff like handwriting) and that if the hentotsukuri (left and right thing) are really close then you're really stubborn and if they're really separated then you're really open.

so now i'm wondering if what they said matches with your actual personality.

I can read it just fine, looks good to me.
I personally would try to avoid writing on anything else than
karo'd paper, as I tend to write kanji too broad.
The "su" needs a little bit more straightness I'd say, maybe make the whirl smaller or the
vertical part before the whirl a tad bit longer.

Try squeezing kanji just a tad bit tigther on the broadness and don't try
to write "too tidy", because it's the same as with our normal handwriting, we get lazy.

Just some thoughts, not that I'd do any better or something.

I didn't think the の was that bad, but your め needs work because it looks like a の that you tried to cross out. The loop needs to cut the top of the stroke.

Overall it looks fine.

Yeah I think for my kana す and め are definitely the worst. Definitely gotta work on those.

原稿用紙 sheets would probably be a good idea.

Maybe writing them out for every review is a bit overkill, but I've noticed it really helps with being able to remember how to write all of the Kanji. RTK taught me how to write the Kanji, but writing them in some context helps me remember exactly what is correct in that situation.

For example 復習 and 複雑. The first kanji is read ふく in both cases, however the left side is different while the right remains the same. The writing exercise has really helped with these sorts of situations. It's not a problem of being able to see the differences in the Kanji, or how to write them, it's just remembering when each one is used.

howtwosavealif3 Wrote:actually I saw on some tv show (japanese) about handwriting assessment (whatever that's called where they judge your personality from stuff like handwriting) and that if the hentotsukuri (left and right thing) are really close then you're really stubborn and if they're really separated then you're really open.

so now i'm wondering if what they said matches with your actual personality.

I've never really believe in things like that in the first place, but I imagine being a learner of a language messes with those results, because you're still learning how to write properly. I'll see if I can remember this though for a few years down the line when my Japanese is actually passable, and then I'll analyze my handwriting again. lol.

Thanks for all the responses.

i don't think り should be connected...

your characters should be angled up and to the right very slightly, they look funny angled down and to the right.

で　looks funny because the dots are inside the character; handwritten, it should be on the top right of the character

if you have time watch this series, it's pretty good at making your characters look nice.

overall it's fine though, just being picky
i think the only thing that confused me was ３階, i couldn't read it at all. i thought it was 3β　皆。

kainzero Wrote:i don't think り should be connected...

your characters should be angled up and to the right very slightly, they look funny angled down and to the right.

で　looks funny because the dots are inside the character; handwritten, it should be on the top right of the character

if you have time watch this series, it's pretty good at making your characters look nice.

overall it's fine though, just being picky
i think the only thing that confused me was ３階, i couldn't read it at all. i thought it was 3β　皆。

Nah, the で and り are fine.

Edit: This is a site to generate the 原稿用紙: http://incompetech.com/graphpaper/genkoyoushi/

If you have Windows Journal there's also a couple templates for it.

kainzero Wrote:i don't think り should be connected...

your characters should be angled up and to the right very slightly, they look funny angled down and to the right.

で　looks funny because the dots are inside the character; handwritten, it should be on the top right of the character

if you have time watch this series, it's pretty good at making your characters look nice.

overall it's fine though, just being picky
i think the only thing that confused me was ３階, i couldn't read it at all. i thought it was 3β　皆。

Yeah り isn't necessarily supposed to be connected. Although I know it is in a lot of fonts, and it's just faster to write it that way.

The dots for で always looked like they were more inside, but I guess that's more in computer fonts then? I didn't know that. I'll have to see if I can find some good examples of normal kana handwriting.

Thanks for the video link I'll definitely check it out.

Did you have trouble with that more so because of how the B like radical looked or the spacing, or just the combination of the two? That's one of the radicals I think I'm worst at.

The り ought to have that little connection, I think. It's easier to write and looks better. The dots inside/outside thing sounds like a made up rule to me (and if it's not it's silly), re: で, but I don't know, I write it both ways.

Edit: Sorry if I seem grouchy in this thread. Pretend there's a happy emoticon at the end of all my sentences. ;p

Edit: Actually you could put a bit less of a hook at the bottom of your で, and move the marks a bit higher. I'm just going by your handwriting vs. mine, too lazy to look up native samples, so take all my words with a grain of salt. ;p

nest0r Wrote:The り ought to have that little connection, I think. It's easier to write and looks better. The dots inside/outside thing sounds like a made up rule to me (and if it's not it's silly), re: で, but I don't know, I write it both ways.

Edit: Sorry if I seem grouchy in this thread. Pretend there's a happy emoticon at the end of all my sentences. ;p

You don't seem all that grouchy to me. lol.

Yeah I've always kinda like り better with the connection. I've never even seen で with dots on the outside though. Although since I'm not in Japan I don't actually get to see peoples handwriting that often, and trying to search for it has never yielded very good results, and computer fonts aren't really the best of references for handwriting.

nest0r Wrote:Edit: Actually you could put a bit less of a hook at the bottom of your で, and move the marks a bit higher. I'm just going by your handwriting vs. mine, too lazy to look up native samples, so take all my words with a grain of salt. ;p

Now that you mention it I do put a pretty big hook at the end of it. Never really noticed that before.

And thanks for the 原稿用紙 link. I'll definitely make some and use those after I can get to the store and get some paper to print it on. lol.

Oh, and on writing/overkill, re: when to choose the periodic writing vs. doing so every time: doing it for recall/recognition when you feel it necessary/feel fuzzy, etc. is why I suggested it, but I wasn't sure if that was your motivation and didn't want to evangelize handwriting as I normally do. ^_^ Since the side effect is still to have nice handwriting, I figured I'd mention it even sans rationale.

arch9443 Wrote:So I've been writing down core 2k sentences for quite a while now. In anki I have 3 types of cards for each vocab word. One where it shows the word in Kanji and the Kana/Translation on the back with audio. One where it shows the Sentence in Kanji on front, and has the Kana/translation and audio on the back. And the final one where the front just has the audio with the word "listen", and back has the sentence in Kanji and Kana and the translation. I've been writing sentences every single time one of the "listen" cards comes up, but I'm not sure if I should change some of my writing habits before continuing.

Here's a few sentences(as many as my phone could fit comfortably on the screen at once), and I was wondering if anything in these sentences sticks out with my handrwiting as needs major improvement.

http://i.imgur.com/ggQy4.jpg

Sorry that the picture is a bit blurry, taking a decent picture with my phone is rather difficult, and my actual camera is even worse >.< Any constructive criticism is appreciated.

Totally legible to me. You seem to have the same issue as me with す and を in which they come out not as pretty though.

For the す, I'd recommend (for now) making the loop smaller and closer to the top/beneath the horizontal stroke, and prioritize making the entire thing form something that feels more vertical from top to bottom. That is to say, make sure you've got a substantive piece at the bottom that doesn't deviate too far from the vertical axis to the left or right (though obviously it's naturally going to flow left).

And for the の, I tend to make a straighter line (Edit: still at an angle, though, and not perfectly straight, more of a subtle balance) in the middle to achieve a better circle, using the rigidity of drawing it to sort of pivot around. ;p

My handwriting isn't great. But that's horrible. People are being nice but if you wrote that quickly and didn't really care then okay as long as its just for yourself. but if you are writing for someone else, a teacher or a note of things to do etc., that handwriting won't pass the test. Writing as a form of communication to portray an idea needs to be presented in a way that shows the intent of the message. What your handwriting is saying to me is I don't care about what you think and don't really want to be taken seriously. Just practice more and pay more attention to native handwriting or even textbook handwriting and it will better. The proportions are what is making it look bad.

An example of what I'm talking about whenever I write my name it comes out immaculate stylized and neat. The rest of the message may be very much more casual. But when it comes to my name it deserves the attention to be made presentable as it is the most important two or three words I will ever write in my life. My identity in word form. Respect the writing and it gets you respect from readers. I've never been turned down from an application because my forms come out nice.

NoSleepTilFluent, I think you're projecting your own feelings about handwriting onto other people. I'm guessing that the majority of people (in America) don't take it quite so seriously. Your writing style just now came off as sounding weirdly preachy, and I think that's a more important thing to keep in check than how beautifully you write your name. Of course, in special circumstances like job applications writing neatly become much more important in a more concrete way--it's related to success rather than just aesthetic preference. This is more true in Japan, where neatness on job applications is crazily important.

Plus, you seem to be ignoring the fact that arch9443 is a learner, so it's not as if the handwriting looks like that just out of laziness.

You also connect き?! That's quite weird, I've never seen that before outside of screen-fonts. but guess it sort of makes sense..

Your kanji is ok though bit wide. However, I would seriously recommend you go back to basics on your kana, and start practising them again individually. How did you learn them? Try using graph paper, where squares are divided into 4 - that way you can make sure the proportions are correct.

Also personally I would NOT start to do joined up before you are able to write beautiful regular characters. Can you imagine an english learner writing in cursive before they can print nice regular letters? It would look like hell. Joined up should follow automatically after your hands gets so used to writing normally, it just wants to keep flowing. I think you're doing it too soon.

What's a 寿司室?

aphasiac Wrote:You also connect き?! That's quite weird, I've never seen that before outside of screen-fonts. but guess it sort of makes sense..

Your kanji is ok though bit wide. However, I would seriously recommend you go back to basics on your kana, and start practising them again individually. How did you learn them? Try using graph paper, where squares are divided into 4 - that way you can make sure the proportions are correct.

Also personally I would NOT start to do joined up before you are able to write beautiful regular characters. Can you imagine an english learner writing in cursive before they can print nice regular letters? It would look like hell. Joined up should follow automatically after your hands gets so used to writing normally, it just wants to keep flowing. I think you're doing it too soon.

I learned the kana just by doing the Remembering the Kana books. And they tend to look pretty strange to me as well. No matter how many times I write them they never seem quite right. And I plan to practice on some 原稿用紙 like with the link nest0r gave me, but when I go back to writing on normal lined paper I'm pretty sure I'll continue to screw up the proportions. Even when I try to write carefully in English it looks pretty bad. At this point I'm just hoping for legible lol.

One of the main problems with learning how to handwrite nicely is I can't really find any good examples of it. So I don't have that much to go off of.

JimmySeal Wrote:What's a 寿司室?

That... is a very good question. I think I derped because of 教室 being in the previous sentence. I meant　寿司屋, which I'm sure you guessed that much. lol.

i got the で stuff from the DS software "DS 美文字　トレーニング"

i wouldn't connect り or き or さ. if you write in a cursive style it does come out, and obviously things are different with a brush, but typically you don't see it connected. if you write quickly to take notes, then yeah, it just so happens to be that way, but i wouldn't purposely connect it if only because it's the way i've been taught and i haven't seen otherwise.

as for nosleepuntilfluent's comments:
after watching that NHK special and playing that DS game, i decided to write all my characters super neat, very slowly and with great concentration. on the next vocab quiz in my class, i barely finished half of it before the teacher asked us to turn it in. i had to speed it up after that, haha.

he is right in that some teachers won't pass you unless you can write properly and neatly though, if you do plan on pursuing japanese in a university setting. i think they expect at least some knowledge of aesthetics... things like making 口 into less of a square and more of a trapezoid, the top part of 軍 having a straight left side but a hane on the right side, angling everything up and to the right slightly, etc.

I actually kinda thought that connecting き　and さ was the more normal way to do it, and the unconnected version was what people did when they got better. I try to write all my kana the conventional way for now, except for り because writing it separated just feels so unnatural. That's the only one I intentionally changed. I'll try and write the others the more standard way as well.

the other kana that I'm never really sure about is そ because I've seen it written where the first line is more of a drop instead of a line. I'm not sure what's more standard for that one.

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.

And I likely won't be dealing with Japanese in an academic setting or anything. I don't really care to much for language classes, in my experience they just suck the fun out of things. They take something I love and actually want to learn about, and make me want to avoid it.

Maybe some of you can post images of your Japanese handwriting so that those of us who are at the early stages of trying to write (and who are not in Japan) can have an idea of what natural/nice handwriting looks like.

It's legible, but looks like it was written by a seven year old

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.

I wanna see NoSleepTilFluent's writing now