What currently drives my motivation to dabble with Japanese again (studied it for a while but didn’t finish and now it’s more of a fun hobby) is mostly the pleasure of recognizing and drawing kanji.
Does anyone here ever practice writing kanji, contemplate how ugly the handwriting looks, but then by some freak accident draws a kanji that makes you immediately go “Holy shit, nailed this one!”
[This just happened](https://i.imgur.com/UFKxRvg.jpg) ( 族 ) and I was really happy and felt like sharing. I mostly feel like a toddler when writing Japanese, but these random occurences make it immensely fun.
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If anyone has good recommendations for sources regarding beginner friendly calligraphy, feel free to share!
13 comments
I do some practice writing kanji relatively frequently. I find that it helps me find and learn the small differences between similar ones in a much more long term way, rather than just reading them.
It is definitely a great feeling when you manage to write one quite well, as if it was printed 😀
It looks great. Btw, which pen do you use?
I love writing kanji, but my handwriting is too horrible to show. Every once in a while I get a stroke or a kanji just right and it actually looks decent enough.
The balance seems to be very difficult to find. But practice makes perfect and since it’s just a hobby I am happy with every bit of progress.
What does this mean?
Honestly I’m happy if anything I write is legible, be it English or Japanese.
If you want your writing to look better, here are some tips (disclaimer: my only experience with calligraphy is 1 free class at university):
1. The brush should usually be tilted to the lower right. Usually you also want to enter strokes from the upper left.
2. Make sure the strokes are all solid throughout by making sure the pen is stopped and pressed down at the beginning and whenever you bend.
3. Pay attention to stroke endings. There’s 3 types: tome (stop), hane (hook), and harai (sweeping). In your example, the horizontal strokes are all tome. Yours aren’t stopped properly (they look more like harai), and in (kaisho) calligraphy you should also lift to the upper left. The lower-left stroke in 方 and the short ノ-like strokes in and above 矢 are left harai; they look pretty OK. The last stroke in 矢 is a right harai. [Here’s a blog post that shows how to write it](https://learnshodo.blogspot.com/2016/09/shodo-online-lesson-3-left-sweep-and.html). The only hane is in 方, which could be a little sharper.
Unfortunately I don’t have a brush or fudepen handy to give an example, but there are plenty of examples online.
as an asian most people here don’t really care about handwriting so you’re doing great even compared to natives! keep it up
it’s not great but good on you for the progress
Man, I finished japanese last week. Pfff…
If you want to focus on brushed kanji, I recommend the shodo subreddit. It’s a good community for calligraphy.
If you want to focus on penned kanji handwriting, feel free to DM me for advice. The main early things are following the proper stroke order, and practicing consistently. I use Midori MD grid notebooks and a fountain pen. [Here’s](https://i.imgur.com/ZR1e0dd.jpg) how my handwriting looked maybe 6 months back after a year or two of learning kanji by writing them a lot.
edit: here’s a current one [https://i.imgur.com/tL7Imhf.jpg](https://i.imgur.com/tL7Imhf.jpg)
Not even kanji – for some reason I just can’t get my brain to write nice, consistent か … but every now and then, I’ll write that looks decent, how it’s meant to. It’s rewarding but then they start looking shit again. Oh well.
What usually makes my strokes bad when doing calligraphy is hesitation. As soon as I hesitate or get nervous, the current or next stroke will tend to be bad.
I usually follow this [youtube channel](https://youtube.com/c/takumitohgu) for basic tips on calligraphy whenever I want to practice some basic strokes.
What got me through was probably my strict teacher. Always had three points for every stroke: beginning, middle, and exit. It takes practice to get better and a good judge to say where it’s wrong.
How did you upload a picture to this sub?
Also what u/firefly431 said is on point. To improve your handwriting (both brush and pen), I recommend looking at a couple of videos of high level calligraphers writing kanji in with a brush.
There are lots of specific little techniques. For example, the sweep at the bottom right is straighter than yours and gradually gets thicker until it stops, at which point you change the direction of your hand movement to the upper/center right, lift and give it a a little tail. Or for dots: dots are dots, not lines, so you make them by pressing the brush down in one spot and maybe slightly moving away to give it a tail. In your case you would do this in the top right.
Sorry lots of text.