A number of years back I was writing out a note for a friend in Japanese at a school I taught at in Japan. I spent a lot of time to making it as neat as possible, with perfect stroke orders, and a nice balance. I asked my Japanese co-worker, a 60-year old math teacher to quickly look it over. He laughed and told me rather directly, “this looks like something a child in 3rd grade wrote.”
You’ve seen real Japanese handwriting. You probably couldn’t read it. I understand the concept behind needing to learn the basics before you go off developing your own style. But I think study time is better spent on other things than learning how to write perfectly, which will eventually be naturally deformed overtime.
Write with sloppy, imperfect handwriting right from the beginning. Go ahead. Trust me, no one will know the difference.
Next time someone tells you the incredible importance of stroke order and proper form of Japanese writing, just nod your head and daydream of how you are going to win $7 million dollars at an evil pachinko game in a dubious casino in order to escape your slave life in the underground emperor’s kingdom.
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I understand your point. Perfectly copying characters line for line, stroke for stroke, out of a text book will not look natural.
But, at the risk of putting you on the defensive, I’m going to be blunt. Telling people to be sloppy from the start is horrible advice that could lead to handwriting that is illegible to a native because the queues that are important, that guide in recognizing ‘sloppy’ handwriting will be missing or wrong.
In *any* task, be it language or otherwise, one needs to learn do to something the correct way first. Then one can naturally become lazy, sloppy, hasty, etc.
In writing, we learn to follow the correct form, then we relax our writing style and move away from the ‘textbook’ form of a character or letter. But the writing style is still guided by the correct form and writing order, merely relaxed, lazy, hasty.
If you start from “sloppy” without the scaffolding and framework of the correct form and correct method behind it, then you end up in a very bad place, indeed, be it with writing or any other skill or craft you might undertake.
My advice is learn to do something the “right” way, then naturally relax the style to find a handwriting that will be natural and attractive.
If anyone would like an alternative to the block-like printed style, I can also recommend
this native japanese handwriting book. ISBN978-4-415-02639-8
Thanks for the book suggestion ^^
Although I am maybe level 35-ish, I never bothered practicing my handwriting at all, because when am I going to use that in rural Missouri? ..but it can’t hurt to get a book and get a little practice in.
I’m starting to realize (horrifyingly) that although I have faithfully mastered my radicals, and could recognize many a kanji from a mile away as easily as I recognize my own name, if I take them away and sit down to write them, my mind comes up blank. Hehe ^^;
I will buy that book~ ..but not from Amazon. They should be ashamed of those shipping prices. :x
A few days ago, some Japanese students saw some kanji scribbled on my notebook. I wrote them hastily and they were sloppy. Yet the students were impressed and commented on how “natural” my writing is. This past weekend I went to a restaurant called 梅の花. I couldn’t even read the 花. Real, “Sloppy” Japanese is the stuff you’ll see everywhere. Though I do agree with JohnH in that gradually relaxing from the “right” way is a good idea.
Although nothing really matters anymore because of these 携帯電話.
Certainly, perfectly printed characters that mimic a printed font will seem childish.
But please don’t imply that “stroke order” is not worth worrying about. Stroke order may not be strictly necessary if you perfectly mimic a printed font, but as soon as you get to real/cursive/sloppy handwriting (not to mention reading calligraphy, which is unavoidable), stroke order makes all the difference – because the sloppiness itself is determined by the stroke order.
You can argue that learning to write is perhaps not the best use of everyone’s effort (I would disagree, because learning basic writing does not take very long and will greatly enhance reading ability, particularly with calligraphy and stylized fonts in pop culture, store signs, ads, manga, onscreen text in variety programs, and everything else interesting that isn’t a bureaucratic form or newspaper) but if you’re going to learn to write, take the 2% extra effort to learn stroke order or you’re shooting yourself in the foot.
Myself? For now, perfectly printing childish-looking characters. Because I’m basically a child, just learning to write. And as soon as I get the basics down pat, and start writing longer texts instead of SRSing single kanji, I’ll be too impatient to bother and my handwriting will degrade into correct, legible, adult handwriting.
Although I believe there might be a slight difference between going sloppy from the start and “narrow-path-to-crap”, I just have this to say from my very modest experience:
They both end up looking like complete sh*t!! (The few times I’ve “interpreted” handwritten Japanese it was hard to even recognize 子.)
If this is the case then putting in extra effort to discriminate your sh*t from other peoples sh*t seems low priority. Just a thought folks!
Ah handwriting, my bane. I love 日本語 and enjoy speaking it but my writing skills look yucky. Scribble. My own style has crept into the stroke order of things and by trying to smooth it out by working on the proper way to write characters out has been the task. Did I learn the correct way to write them from the start? Yes. Can I get them just right so when a Japanese native looks at them they don’t pop out a red pen and correct all me errors? Noooo. Even my graphic designer friend who works with typography has a time trying to get these things correct! I won’t give up on trying to improve my handwriting for Japanese the same goes for my handwriting in English. I think it is a life long developmental process.
Most native Japanese speakers say I have really pretty handwriting, because I write like that. I also write my さ and り like it’s written on a computer. My handwriting is ugly enough in English, I don’t have to mess it up in a second language.
I see what you mean but I think maybe you mean not to be too focused on making your kanji look like the computer but neat enough for your own handwriting. No need to be sloppy just no need to stress your hand with too much neatness and correctness. For me my English writing is blocky and neat and I get complimented by it even though I don’t care for compliments. So my Japanese writing also is blocky and neat but at times when I’m quickly writing it’s sloppy because I have mastered the strokes. For the unknown kanji thats when I try to carefully write correctly but not focus too much on neatness. Anyway who cares if it’s extra neat and looks like a 3rd grader or sloppy and looks like a 12th graders lol. As long as it’s legible thats all that matters ^_^
Wait, so no stroke order is needed? O.o
Yup, none needed. Just follow the very broad general guideline of trying to start from left to right and then up to down and you’ll be fine.
NICE