Like in English, if a little kid has terrible handwriting, you can still tell what they’re writing because the english alphabet consists of only 26 characters and each one is unique enough to stand out. Not only that, but you can write an english letter terribly and still know what it is, if not, you can probably figure it out based on context clues of the surrounding letters.
I’m starting to learn Japanese and it seems unforgiving. If a character is slightly tweaked, then it’s a completely different word.
Is messy Japanese handwriting easy for a native Japanese to read, or are they like “wtf are you writing”
Edit: another thing is that you can write Japanese characters small to give it a different sound, which seems like something really easy to mess up.
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I think the ability to read sloppy handwriting improves with the intuition you gain after years of learning. Basically what word or character makes the most sense to be there
What makes you think the same principles you mentioned for English don’t apply to Japanese as well? Our brains are really good at pattern recognition and once you’re familiar enough with the written language you can read most bad handwriting just fine, even if there might be some parts that require a bit of thinking before it clicks, no matter what writing system it uses
> If a character is slightly tweaked, then it’s a completely different word
Do you have an example of what you mean by that?
> another thing is that you can write Japanese characters small to give it a different sound
You could write all small kana like their large versions and it wouldn’t make the text much less readable except in some very specific cases. In fact that’s pretty much what written Japanese was like before the post-war kana spelling reform (with a lot of other added difficulties)
I’ve noticed that most Japanese people that I’ve met would actually describe their handwriting as 汚い (dirty), but the fundamental difference between a beginning learner’s messy handwriting and a native speaker’s messy handwriting is that native speakers are taught to write hiragana and kanji from a young, young, young age to write with a certain stroke order. This stroke order means that every character has a flow. Most native speakers I know have told me they “decode” others’ (almost illegible to me) handwriting through this flow. (This works on a smartphone’s Chinese handwriting input too, btw. You can write something incredibly sloppy and not lift your finger, and the handwriting input will have a pretty good guess which character you’re trying to type.)
The difference with beginning learners is that beginning learners tend to focus their energy on the shape of the character, even at the sacrifice of that handwriting flow. That actually means that the learners who don’t yet have the flow sometimes have handwriting shapes that provide more headaches to native readers than natives who write in a semi-cursive style.
I’d recommend starting off focusing on proper tome (equal pressure), hane (short flick upward), and harai (varying pressure, sweeping left or right) strokes plus stroke order. You can let your handwriting quality slip a little as you fall into the proper stroke order and understand the invisible track your hand is supposed to make from one hane to the next tome, for instance.
By the way, the same thing can happen in English. Sometimes I’ve seen learners write letters that resemble Latin letters but maybe they started from the bottom or right, so the text felt disjointed and uncomfortable, even though the shape was I guess pretty close?
On the flip side, I feel able to read a lot of people’s English or semi-cursive because of certain cues like dots over lowercase i or the height of lowercase l vs. lowercase e. There’s a certain flow that makes sense since I grew up reading it. Same thing with natives who write using semi-cursive in Japanese.
Fluent readers don’t read characters, they scan and recognize patterns. The more patterns you become familiar with, the easier bad writing is to decipher, especially when it’s malformed in ways you’re accustom to.
Of course, if you only ever read printed, non-stylized characters, then you might have more difficulty than someone who’s accustom to reading handwritten text.
**Fun example:**
*(Although not quite related)*
> It deosn’t mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a toatl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe.
Takes me ages to decipher my Japanese friends handwriting lol