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Post by 魔 on Jan 1, 2014 14:03:08 GMT
Here's my hiragana... I found a new way to writeき、ほ、ま、も. With a Z instead of two lines. Here's some handwriting from 2 other people. cursive?Print?
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Post by Bokusenou on Jan 3, 2014 0:44:26 GMT
Great thread idea Demonhead! For anyone practicing handwriting, you can find a lot of videos and websites about it by searching for ペン字.
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Post by Jembru on Jan 3, 2014 2:04:28 GMT
Great tip Rin! I'm desperate to start learning shorthand for kanji. I'm sick of how long it takes to write them.
When I saw this, I tried to take a photograph of a page from my journal, but I couldn't find one that wasn't sort of personal. Maybe I'll write something deliberately contrived for the sake of the forum. I hate my handwriting in English never mind the scribbles I call Japanese. Radicals the size of whole kanji, little mini half-sized kana and more often than not, entire characters completely missing. It's not exactly something I'm proud of! Although at least I've stopped writing kana backwards ^^
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Post by 魔 on Jan 15, 2014 16:50:34 GMT
Here's my latest bit of writing from my "Let's learn hiragana" workbook. linklink
It wants you to just write out hiragana/romaji. I just write the hiragana, then look up the kanji and write that too.
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Post by Jembru on Jan 15, 2014 22:59:16 GMT
Your hand writing is far neater than mine. You often can't tell if my kanji are compound words, are just two very fat radicals side by side. Lol.
I actually took a photo of the last entry I made in my journal, but I can't upload it to photobucket from work. Also, I've just read it from the photo on my phone, and while I thought at the time, it was one of my less insane entries, it's actually pretty mad, especially without the necessary information to put it in context. I'll keep trying though. Surely eventually I'll write about something normal people write about...
Oh also.. I've started cheating when I write kanji. For example, I use the word mahou a few times in the entry in question. I got tired of writing ma in full, so I started using crosses instead of the mini 'wood' radicals. I also just draw an A for that mark between the right leg and the rice field.
I wish I could write Japanese on my phone... Anyway, I really need to start learning proper shorthand for kanji to make writing easier, before I completly invent my own.
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Post by Jembru on Jan 19, 2014 9:04:51 GMT
Well, I was just uploading some photos of the notebooks and checklists I use to organise my study, to share in the 'daily study routines thread', as I've been dying to show them off. I decided that while I'm there, I may as well share the page from my dairy (diary, must try harder, see me) after all. I took a few, and I've deliberately chosen the one that came out the most blurry. Although you can sadly still make out my mistakes, like the だ that should have been で and, I'm not sure if I had intended to write を when I did that wrong と, or if I was going to use なる in stead of 受ける. It's in pencil, so I really should have changed this before photographing. This is my actual journal btw. It has four sections, only one of which is in Japanese. The others are English, but split into categories. I need to organise my thoughts like this because my brain doesn't seem to want to do it naturally. The cloud at the top of the page is something I do for every entry. These are kanji I needed to look up how to write, while I was writing the entry. I put them there because there's a good chance that if I needed it once, it would pup up again while I'm still on the same topic. Don't let that fool you that I know all the other kanji by heart though. I have a little pop-out card that I keep in this journal, that has about 20 kanji I frequently use but forget how to write. They're in pencil so I can erase them and add new ones as I get better at writing them, but as I hand write only a couple of times a month, the process is painfully slow. That said, I do write a good handful from memory, but usually not well. So some might be written slightly wrong, often with bits the wrong way around or an incorrect component (I mix up 夂 and 又 a lot for example, almost always opting for the former). I used to have another journal that I wrote down the page from right to left like proper Japanese, but I found everything started to drift to the left for some reason. I have a proper Japanese notebook somewhere, that has the little markers at the top and bottom of the page and a place to write the date and weather, but I don't know when I'll next get to go to Japan to replace it, so I'm a bit reluctant to use it until my writing is significantly better. For now then, I'm just writing left to right. Even as a kid, I had problems with literacy and had to have special tuition until the age of 7 or 8, so it's no wonder that writing is my biggest difficulty in Japanese too. I just can't think carefully while I write and I'm not very good at noticing mistakes when I read things over. I only started to care about spelling when I was teaching, because my employment kinda depended on it! I'm just very thankful that the Internet makes it possible to 'write' in Japanese without ever actually needing to remember stroke order at all (or even bother to learn kanji thanks to rikaikun, tsk). Even the JLPT doesn't test writing ability. It's a comfort that we automatically assumed not to be able to cope with writing kanji. ^^
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Post by 魔 on May 2, 2014 14:53:41 GMT
Here's an interesting series of videos about handwriting. 簡単ルールで 一生きれいな字
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Post by Jembru on May 2, 2014 18:54:11 GMT
What a coincidence! There's been no activity in this thread for months, and then two of us have something to share on the same day! A friend of mine just shared with me his ingenious method of practicing writing kanji. He takes a sudoku puzzle then replaces each number with a particular kanji. Then he can solve the puzzle while writing the kanji! (Photo shared with his permission) I haven't handwritten in months actually. It's still lowest on my priority, but I know I should make more time for it.
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Post by LittleGaijin on May 3, 2014 0:47:45 GMT
Oooooh I love the idea behind this thread! (Jemma your diary is so adorable that now when I look at mine I feel like a man. </3) I haven't been (physically) writing in Japanese for a while (or in English for that matter), but I'll see if I can dig up a page from my diary that isn't as embarrassing as all my other pages. I use my diary as a means of not worrying about making mistakes, and just focusing on getting my point across and writing about what I would have written had I been writing in English. The last time I used my diary was early last year, so my Japanese was especially crap. But for now, I did a quick Kana chart!
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Post by LittleGaijin on May 3, 2014 7:10:57 GMT
Here's my crap " well no one's gonna see this anyways (whoops)"-penmanship, and embarrassing diary. I guess I should go get some help for this junk food addiction that I have... because it's apparently so bad that I felt the need to dedicate a page of my diary to the fact that I hadn't eaten junk food in a week. Seriously, what the f... When one of my best friends, Hitomi, was visiting America, she brought me this special kanji practice book (with a picture of the Kobe Tower on the front since we went there together when I was last in Japan). I use this book to practice writing any new kanji that I see or use online. Sometimes I remember, most of the time I don't...
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Post by Jembru on May 5, 2014 1:09:06 GMT
Jemma your diary is so adorable that now when I look at mine I feel like a man. Lol, no.. you don't seem like a man, you just seem like an ordinary adult. I have a problem, I mean I have a serious addiction to buying stationary. Maybe one day I'll take a photo of my box of notebooks I haven't used yet. There is a store near my home that sells good quality stationary at a fraction of their originial retail price (I found one notebook for 79p that was £5.99 in another store, for example). I just can't walk past that shelf without putting something in my basket. It's a serious issue! I'm just as bad for stickers too, and have a whole shoe-box sized box full of nothing but stickers. For some reason, I always buy girly stationary. I think this is because I was a tomboy as a kid (and until my mid-twenties in fact), so I'm making up for a phase in my childhood that I never experienced because I was too obsessed with Slimer (Ghostbusters), Beetlejuice and Davros (Doctor Who), <-- I had some weird crushes as a kid. The really weird thing is that although I love my notebooks and how they look, pink is actually my least favourite colour! I don't dislike it, but I actually prefer purple and turquoice, especially in my clothing. I've just forced myself to fill an entire sack with stuff to throw out. It's something I do at least once a year to force myself not to hoard to much. I managed to throw away some stuff (although kept 3 rulers, despite only physically being able to draw one straight line at any one time, so having no need for 3, because I couldn't decide which of the 3 was nicest), but the unused notebooks just had to stay. I DID throw out my old completed notebooks though. I kept hold of them because I kept thinking there'll be words or phrases in them that I've forgotten. Eventually though, I accepted that if I didn't learn the word the first time around, it will show up again for me eventually and I can try again in a new context. Our recycling bin is pretty full this week! ^^
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Post by Jade on May 8, 2014 12:41:59 GMT
Ignore what I'm saying cause it has nothing to do with anything and I'm tired and blah~~
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Post by Jembru on Oct 17, 2014 3:22:05 GMT
Does anyone know where I could find some decent images of Japanese handwriting on lined note paper (left to right). I'm having issues getting my writing to look neat so need some inspiration.
EDIT: sorry, I was on my phone and wrote that quickly. We all posted writing on lined paper so now that reads like I'm saying 'anything better than that...'. No I mean, I'm trying to find examples of handwriting in school notebooks or whatever, by native Japanese speakers.
Specifically I'm looking for what counts as 'neat' handwriting to the Japanese. I want to know.. do the characters touch the line like when we write nicely in English? So far I've only seen non-native writers and ours don't seem to. I've been trying to make mine, but it's hit and miss. I really have to concentrate and think about the rest of the character. Like if I'm writing something like 明 or 現 I have to make sure the first (明) or second (現) stroke (whichever is vertical for the character in question) hovers above the ruled line to make space for the right hand side of the character. Yet when writing say, 親 or 競 I can make the left hand side touch the line, so they tend to come out a bit neater by my definition of 'neat'. Then there's the fact that most characters write the top section first, so you need to be thinking the whole time about how much space to leave underneath... It's too much.
I have been practicing on squared paper, writing my characters over 4 squares to help me visualise the proportions better. When characters are broken down this way (like on jisho.org for example), they don't touch the bottom line.
Also size is an issue for me. Jade has already mentioned that her teacher told her not to write too small*. But for me, writing small is how I keep my English handwriting neat.
I've started having trial runs of keeping my notes in Japanese and I'm just not happy with how it looks so far. I only have 10 weeks to fix this.. I'm freaking out. ^^
*omg I just realised something... I'm the only staff member at Gaiwa that has never taken formal lessons. Now I HAVE to succeed in mastering Japanese. I owe it to everyone else who's doing this alone, to prove it can be done.. So no pressure then. >.<
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Post by Jembru on Oct 18, 2014 21:38:40 GMT
Does anyone know where I could find some decent images of Japanese handwriting on lined note paper (left to right). I'm having issues getting my writing to look neat so need some inspiration. Am I talking to myself? Haha, yeah.. I've finally cracked. ^^ So due to how badly I'm obsessing over this, I had a go at finding examples myself. I've come up with a few examples of what the Japanese appear to consider neat handwriting; This one does indeed seem to reach the line, but not every character does. They've taken more care over their cursive kanji than they have their kana and I'm not a huge fan of this scratchy style and don't think I would be happy with my precious notes looking like this. So next.. This looks more like my own writing, by which I mean, more like printed Japanese. I'm quite fond of the way their characters lean to the left. It's nice that they don't just look like carbon copies of printed characters like mine do (maybe I'm flattering myself a bit there.. you know what I mean). I particularly like how 本当 came out there. The 手 of 手術 is too narrow in my opinion, but it's the only character I don't like. The pen is far too thick, but overall, I think this might be the direction I'm leaning (get it... leaning.. because the characters are... ah whatever) I'm going to try to make most characters touch the line like these people, and having looked around, I think filling the space to about 3/4 is acceptable. So I'll work on trying to get the hang of that. It seems touching the line is optional though, so I won't fret too much if I end up with floating kanji..
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Post by Jembru on Oct 20, 2014 20:48:43 GMT
So.. I have been practicing writing kanji with the sloping horizonatal strokes. It's going to take a bit of getting used to, but it definitely looks neater. Because the right hand side of a character is always a little higher than the left, it helps you to see when one character ends and another starts. So if you're not to good at keeping them all roughly the same size, you don't end up with particles looking like whole kanji.
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