Chinese Handwriting
Like most of you, when I first began learning Chinese, I was very fascinated with the thousands of Chinese characters out there and the methods that people used to learn them. As I began to learn them myself, I began to wonder how people were able to write so fast if there were characters that required so many strokes. Surely if there was a contest between someone writing a paragraph in English and someone writing the equivalent paragraph in Chinese, the former would easily win! However, upon closer examination, two things became evident. Firstly, the equivalent Chinese paragraph would be shorter (in terms of characters required) than its English counterpart. As well, just like in English, Chinese writers use their own form of short hand to greatly speed up their writing.
As you will see in the following examples, when handwriting in Chinese, strokes tend to be slurred. While to the untrained eye the end result for some characters may not look like the characters they are supposed to represent, native speakers can easily make them out. Compare the following with their typed equivalents.
這個名字陪伴了
自己的演藝事業
會蠻挺好聽的
代表著七重火焰
October 31st, 2007 at 12:14 am
Interesting that nobody has commented on this one yet. Is handwriting not popular among students?
So how do you get from laboriously copying printed words stroke by stroke, to something that’s really handwriting? I don’t think you can, unless you have frequent encounters with other people’s handwriting, to gradually absorb the kinds of modifications that are acceptable without changing the character. Or is it something that is taught to kids in school, like how we learned printing first and then cursive writing?
November 1st, 2007 at 4:56 pm
I think it is just that handwriting is far down the list of priorities, I rate reading far higher, it seems that once you can read a bunch of characters confidently, then learning to write them kindergarden style is realtivly easy. I am happy to save cursive until I have mastered the language.
As for the conciseness of the written language, in a way Chinese is a mind-hack. For example the popular microblogging site twitter allows 140 characters per post. You can write a lot more in Chinese in 140 characters than English. Ok techies may point out that for Chinese on a computer you need 16bits per character rather than 8bits for western text, but most web apps play nicely via unicode or UTF8 so that is irrelevant, you can still say more for less.
http://twitter.com/chris_mandarin
I have just decided to use Twitter as an extra learing aid. I can try little snippets of written Chinese on a regular basis and can review what I have written at any time.
December 2nd, 2007 at 5:23 pm
At least for the German poeple around here I can recommend http://www.chdw.de
There you can find lessons on writing characters (among other useful stuff).
June 18th, 2008 at 5:59 pm
I am absolutely perplexed by Chinese handwriting. As a relative beginner (finishing up 1 year of Mandarin study), I feel very confident reading the 200 or 300 characters I know provided they’re in the exact font my textbook uses. Minor deviations in printing style trip me up, to say nothing of attempting to decrypt a Chinese person’s handwriting. They might as well be two entirely different sets of characters.
I agree with Chris that handwriting recognition is something worth putting off until I’ve mastered the language. As I start to see how radicals work together to create meaning, and become more familiar with the ones used in common characters, I’m sure I’ll start to pick up the shorthand by knowing how the radicals are abbreviated. In the mean time, I’m sticking to print.