Starting to write characters without a teacher- bad idea?

[Rrina]

Is it a bad idea to start writing characters by yourself, following the proper stroke order as given in the USC website for instance?

Do you need any special materials or will pencil and regular paper do just fine?

Or it shouldn't be done without a teacher?

I'm tempted because I think it will help me remember the characters better, but it's intimidating; it seems as if things can be really ruined by starting out wrong.

Thanks.

[Ding Yiyi]

Pencil or pen and paper will work fine. Don't worry about screwing up the characters, if you're following the stroke order you'll be fine; what you need a teacher more for is pronunciation and grammar. Writing characters is another entity that really doesn't need a teacher, all it needs is the stroke order. I don't know USC's website and how many characters they have the full stroke orders for but this website has the stroke order for every character in a fun little animation MDBG Chinese Dictionary. Good luck and happy studying!

[JimmySeal]

I learned kanji for 3 years before I had a teacher to correct my writing and I found out that I was writing a lot of things incorrectly and it took me a while to straighten that out.

Two things in particular were that I didn't note the difference between the top of 学 and the top of 党, and I didn't leave a space between the top and bottom of 欠.

I encourage you to study the characters on your own, but also suggest that you have someone knowledgeable look at your writing from time to time. If you posted scans here we'd be happy to have a look at them.

[zozzen]

Thanks! USC's material is really good, but the technology (java and .ra ) is really old. Do you know any other resources that provide animiated chinese character writing?

[JimmySeal]

It's a bit hard to navigate, but yellowbridge.com gives animations for some of the characters. You can give that a try.

[lokki]

Forget about other character animation sites. This site is the one you want.

It has more animated characters available (about 2500) than I have seen on any other site, and it is a "proper" animation as well, which will actually show you exactly how to write each character.

In comparison for instance the MDBG site mentioned above has some 1600 characters, EDIT: oops, deleted the rest of the comment as it seems I was too trigger-happy here. They have two different types of animation and the other type is OK.

EDIT: But when comparing animation sites do make sure that the animation shows stroke direction as well as order. Some animations only show order. And be sure to use a large enough and nice-looking font (kaiti is considered the norm I have read somewhere) to model your writing practice on.