Handwriting Thread!!

[Hofmann 682]

Ok...here was my handwriting yesterday.

[HerrPetersen 47]

Here is mine, from my daily reviews - it is mostly dication mode, with some individual Hanzi thrown in.

@Hofmann - I think I remember you are from Hongkong, or at least you grew up in China, so the rest of us do not have to feel too bad about our stuff! Anyhow looking great!

Edit: I can do a little better than that - this is review mode. I also haiyou should be haiyao.

Edited February 12, 2009 by HerrPetersen

[Hofmann 682]

Little kids' handwriting

Oh, and I grew up in Utah.

[HerrPetersen 47]

Are you trying to make fun of me? Either way - this is one nice writing kid. (I don't mean because you say you grew up in Utah, but because you post this young kids nice-looking chars next to my squished spiders)

[Hofmann 682]

Ehh...well a while back in the thread someone was talking about little kids' handwriting.

Anyway, I've found that simply writing vertically will automatically make one's handwriting look better because vertically-aligned characters have some visual guides that are broken when the characters are written horizontally. For example, if you write some symmetrical characters like "中華不平" vertically, you have the center vertical strokes that you can use to align your characters. So writing vertically will give you improvement with zero effort. I'm used to writing vertically (mostly following the ROC stroke order). My handwriting deteriorates significantly when I try to write horizontally.

You can compare these two:

The vertical one looks better right?

Oh, and use a fountain pen.

Edited February 12, 2009 by Hofmann

[HerrPetersen 47]

Hmm... I guess I can tell the top-to-bottom one looks a little better. What really gets me angry at times is, that once you learned to more or less read printed stuff you have to once again learn how to read handwritten stuff. While your (Hofman's) writing is clearly advanced/native-style you can still read it. But the teacher who corrected some hanzi in the text above - no chance at all.

Anyhow - here my evening review in top-to-bottom-style - still sucks, so no magic here. Still I will switch to reviewing like this for some time, so thanks for the tip. Did not use a ball point fountainpen in this one - but not a yuanzhubi either like in the first.

[imron 5,188]

My handwriting is pretty horrible so I'm not really one to offer advice, but HerrPeterson, I would suggest you perhaps try using paper with gridlines. Currently the proportions of your characters seem a little skewed, and writing within the confines of a box will help improve that.

[HerrPetersen 47]

Thanks for the tip, imron. I have been sloppy with my hanzi for quiet some time now. Just printed out a paper with grids on it, that I put under my white paper. No more slacking down!

[Hofmann 682]

田英章 (a pretty famous modern calligrapher) made instructional videos. Here is a video playlist on brush and fountain pen calligraphy. Watch 3 and 6.

The following is a pretty good beginners' guide.

Edited February 13, 2009 by Hofmann

[fluxs 11]

Hi am not sure if this is fitting here.I was wondering if anybody has some good resources to recommend for learning cursive handwritten chinese. I found that while I have no problem reading printed material, it is sometimes next to impossible to read handwritten (and usually written in cursive style) written chinese.

Is there any recommendations for books or maybe even online resources?

Thanks!

[roddy 5,357]

See here for some links and book recommendations.

[Hofmann 682]

Lots of handwriting here.

And can we merge 本 thread and this one?

Edited May 6, 2009 by Hofmann

[Hofmann 682]

My handwriting again, believe it or not. I was sort of copying the 華康少女字 typeface.

[fluxs 11]

Hofmann, some of these characters look pretty good actually - I like it.

[Outofin 45]

Curious to know how everybody writes.

Don't be shy. I don't expect professional calligraphy. I like to see common stuff.

Before I request you to share your handwriting, I'd better to start from myself. See attachment. Some random names from wuxia novels. Written with a ball pen on an envelope.

[skylee 1,912]

Here is my handwriting, originally posted to this thread.

[Hofmann 682]

I think my handwriting improved. Or this pen is just a lot easier to write with.

[xiaocai 235]

I wrote this piece really very slowly and carefully and I hope that it is legible to most of you, because my hand writing is normally not quite in shape if I speed up to just jot down something quickly.

[Hofmann 682]

my hand writing is normally not quite in shape if I speed up to just jot down something quickly.

So how does it look when you write quickly? BTW, most characters are legible. 邊生 looks like 也古. 上 wasn't legible. Do you write vertically much? I think it should help.

[xiaocai 235]

So how does it look when you write quickly?

It will look like something like this: