The ones I have most trouble with are the ones where you have two other kanji stacked vertically, like 警 "admonish" and 導 "guidance". Horizontally it's not so bad unless there's three parts, like 獄 "prison" and 蹴 "kick".

Christoph wrote:

Which Kanji do you find most awkward or enjoy writing least?　and or which kanji, what kind of kanji do you like the most?

For me it still has to be the strokes from the character for garment 衣

I don't hate it quite so much now that I've had lots of practice writing it, but still I much prefer kanji with lots of straight edges  like 電、雨 and 帯！

こんにちはナルト君！！　＾＿＾

I think this will be interesting because I think there will be a lot of variation between people's likes and dislikes (what's new?) but I think there will be a few kanji we agree are horrible to write.

For example, I really like writing the primitive for "garment", but I agree with Raichu about 警 "admonish" and 導 "guidance" where it's really hard to squash all those elements in vertically and get a nicely proportioned kanji. These are two of my least favourite kanji so far. I'm not keen on "feminine" either.

I think there is only really one element I really dislike and that is 'road' as in 道 (which when hand-written looks very different from version in the 'print' fonts like Mincho, of course). The reason for this is that it's resisted all my efforts and practice and stubbornly refuses to look anything like it ought to! It's that final long stroke that's the killer - I can't get it right.

Another one I'm not keen on is 火 I'm not sure why because I can write it quite well.

Fortunately, these are far outweighed by the kanji I love to write.

Last edited by Pangolin (2006 September 03, 8:50 am)

I have real trouble with things with any kanji containing 'mama' (母) like 貫, 毎, etc - no matter how many times I've done it I just can't get it right. One of the kanji that stumped me when I first looked at it (not through heisig) was 互 but after looking at the stroke order diagrams and practicing it's now one of my favorite kanji's to write. Cool topic.

Pangolin wrote:

krusher wrote:

I have real trouble with things with any kanji containing 'mama' (母) like 貫, 毎, etc - no matter how many times I've done it I just can't get it right. One of the kanji that stumped me when I first looked at it (not through heisig) was 互 but after looking at the stroke order diagrams and practicing it's now one of my favorite kanji's to write. Cool topic.

I had trouble getting 女 right, upon which these kanji are based, of course. It's simplicity is deceptive, I think. And 母 & 毎 are even more tricky. I have these right now after much practice. I really haven't quite got the hang of the variation in 貫 though, and I still have to pause to get stroke order and form correct on this one. Yes, I would add that to my "don't like writing" list.

Just thought I would share a little tip in remembering the 女 kanji.  My wife who is Japanese once told me that the name for a female ninja is 'kunoichi'.  This coincides, perhaps intentionally, with the strokes of 女.  KU く　NO ノ　ICHI 一.

vosmiura wrote:

Just thought I would share a little tip in remembering the 女 kanji.  My wife who is Japanese once told me that the name for a female ninja is 'kunoichi'.  This coincides, perhaps intentionally, with the strokes of 女.  KU く　NO ノ　ICHI 一.

Yes, I wish I'd known that when I first started to write that kanji, it really does help with the shapes and angles as well as the stroke order. I think you are probably right that the name was formed on the mnemonic. I see that it is spelled using katakana plus 一

Funnily enough I first came across the word over the weekend, in a subtitled anime I was watching, the subbers had put a screen note explaining its meaning.

vosmiura wrote:

KU く is hiragana.  NO ノ is katakana but I have noticed that some names in Japanese use this instead of の for example Marunouchi is sometimes written 丸ノ内.  Normally katakana is not used in Japanese names.

Sorry, quite right, there's something very katana-ish about  く though!

Katakana is creeping into more and more aspects of Japanese writing.  I think manga has some influence on this, where katakana is used for emphasis (like the equivalent of capital letters), onomatapoeia and quite often for slang and character names. I think in popular and commercial usage, the boundaries between writing systems are constantly being broken down.

I think that the most difficult kanji for me to make that looks similar to the kanji in print in the book is 子.  I can never seem to make it look quite so nice as the print in the book.

vosmiura wrote:

jondesousa wrote:

I think that the most difficult kanji for me to make that looks similar to the kanji in print in the book is 子.  I can never seem to make it look quite so nice as the print in the book.

Yup, my wife said it's just an old way to write NO using Kanji.

No as in いいえ or no as in の (particle)? I'm not sure it is either. The kanji that means の (particle) is 之. I see this used from time to time, for example in Naruto manga, his home village Konoha (the hidden village of the leaf, literally "leaf of tree") is seen written 木之葉 on banners and such.

(Actually, I've also seen it written 木え葉, I don't know if this is a mistake or whether えis a legitimate variant of 之)

The kanji for no (negative) is否

The KU く　NO ノ　ICHI 一 hint is really helpful up until today, I keep telling that to classmates! (I still cannot see the pictograph of a woman in there, though.)

Least favorite right now: 暑 (#1260 sultry). It has a slight diagonal shift to it, and the way I write it at the moment, it just looks somewhat picasso-ish.

I really dislike writing 一.  There's just nothing there almost.  It feels like it should go on, but then it doesn't.  Very big let down, that one is.

魘　←　getting that thing in single line space is very hard to do with certain writing utensils.

This is a 6 year old thread which should have never been bumped in the first place, but now that it has been, I wanted to address a few things in earlier posts that people were confused about.

1. The use of katakana ノ in place names is an archaism, not a modern "katakana-go" consequence.  (And this is not a kanji.)

2. 子 cannot be used for the particle "no"; I think the initial person replied to the wrong post and others were trying to guess at what it could have meant.

3. If you see え substituted for 之 in print, that is wrong.  But in handwriting, the two are almost identical.

Last edited by yudantaiteki (2012 April 08, 4:13 am)