I started learning Japanese about two weeks ago (starting with Duolingo and now adding in more resources.) I bought some hiragana and katakana workbooks to help solidify what I was learning. English is my first language and I am left handed, many people have commented that I write many letters and numbers “backwards,” which was initially a surprise to me, because that’s just what my brain had always told my hand to do.
How important is the direction of each stroke (culturally and for best practice) when writing in Japanese? I have resources showing how to write many stokes, but often for me going from left to right is far less comfortable than right to left. Does it matter if the characters end up looking “right?”
I figured I’d ask for some advice before I forced myself to work against 30 years of fine motor practice.
6 comments
Well, there IS a standard way to write and an order and direction of strokes. And that dictates the overall shape of the character. Just as in written English, lower case letters have to be written in the standard direction and order if you’re writing cursive. But if you’re printing, it’s far less important.
So you have to ask yourself how important prescriptive ‘correctness’ is. Is someone going to be watching you and judging your writing? If not, I wouldn’t worry too much about it. Having said that, it’s as well to learn the correct way, even if you’re not planning to use it, as it will teach you wider aspects of the character.
I am also left handed and apparently around the same age. I’ve been studying Japanese for a few years. In my opinion, just follow the proper/standard order **and direction** of the strokes. Start doing it now and it’ll become comfortable, even if it isn’t now.
One reason I say this is that if you go and read a regular Japanese person’s handwriting, you can see where they take short cuts when writing kanji, and those short cuts are _understandable_ because they follow the direction and order. So knowing it helps. A common one I see a lot is with 手 the top horizontal stroke goes right to left, then the next horizontal stroke down goes left to right, so I see it a lot where those two just get connected in handwriting (connected on the left side, making a sort of < shape). If you connect it backwards looks very wrong and might even confuse people.
Even in kana this matters, like it’s already difficult to get good looking ツシソン characters when writing and trying to do it the wrong way around would make it harder (and also those katakana characters follow the same general direction as their hiragana counterparts, so not solidifying that sort of knowledge takes away an easy way to tell them apart).
Lefty and former interpreter / translator here. When I was concerned with handwriting (I think it is valuable to learn, but once I began writing digitally, it became hard to maintain the ability to write by hand well), even when reading / processing pages and pages of Japanese per day.
I assume Japanese people are still “corrected” regularly to writing with their right hand. If you want to compete in 書道 or some such, you will be at a handicap. If you’re aiming for passable script, you should be fine.
ギチョー forever!
Write them correctly. It gives the best odds of producing something legible, especially if you write fast and start to connect strokes. You can get away with doing it the wrong way and probably be understood. But why consciously start at a disadvantage?
I’m ambidextrous and haven’t even noticed that I was doing the strokes backwards (I usually change hands when one gets tired, I usually start with the right hand, so left hand hasn’t had as much practice with Japanese yet). I must correct this as well. As others have mentioned, the shortcuts (I think they mean when you write fadt and the strokes kinda touch each other like cursive) won’t make sense otherwise.
Hiragana is derived from cursives of Kanji.
Traditionally, Japanese are written in vertical columns. When written in vertical columns, Hiragana are often written connected to each other. This is called Renmen (連綿). The places where Renmen lines are invisible is called Iren (意連), which means “ a connection of the soul”.
(Kindergarten kids in Japan learn hiragana by writing in vertical columns. Never ever in horizontal lines. None of those numerous, countless, workbooks and such sold in Japan lets you practice hiragana writing by writing in horizontal lines. That is not necessarily the most effective way to learn Japanese language when you are an adult, a non-native speaker of Japanese. But it may not be an entirely bad idea to know that back in your mind, though you do not have to immediately start practicing to write in vertical columns. That should wait.)
There are even opinions, albeit they may sound just a little bit extreme, that nobody in Japan is not writing any character, but what actually people in Japan are doing is to TRACE the strokes (movements of writing instruments) of the writers, thereby, the readers feel the same. That is, someone smiles, you smile back, you guys feel the same. The mirror neurons. You (in general) do not have to entirely agree with that, but it may not be an entirely bad idea either to know the idea: The result (how it looks at the end) is not THAT important, it is the writing process which is more important.
Beginners of learning Japanese writings do not have to worry too much about the shape of each single Hiragana. Your hand written Hiragana do not have to be perfect copies of computer fonts. As Hiragana is derived from cursives of Kanji, as you study Kanji, automatically, your hand writing of Hiragana WILL improve over the time.
(Suppose you learn a formula for calculating the area of a trapezoid, in the second grade of a primary school. Then in a junior high school, you learn, integral calculus, all of a sudden, the formula makes sense….)
If you are interested, you may want to check the 字母, じぼ, literally, character’s mother, of the Hiragana, や. That is Kanji 也. Then check the stroke orders of Kanji 也, and check the cursive of 也. You would be able to see the stroke orders of Hiragana や make 100% perfect sense. You should be able to see the commonly accepted writing order of strokes is more natural to write and therefore has its own logic.
(Once again, beginners of learning Japanese do not have to be able to write cursives. Not at all. All what I am trying to explain here is the background information.)