I personally have limited interest in extensive calligraphy, but recognized that practicing some basic strokes and emulating 楷书 fonts would provide a foundational basis for future native-like handwriting.

I’ve added your writing to the article! It would be interesting to know if mere exposure had much impact on one’s own ability to write. I would guess it does, considering it builds mental representation of what character sarae supposed to look like, even if one might not be able to put it on paper.

https://postimg.cc/PCNh5Krd

I’m afraid I don’t understand your comment. They’re all the same because I asked people to write a specific passage; the first subheading even says “Chinese handwriting from 36 people, using exactly the same tex”, so what did you expect? The whole point is to use the same text so people can compare how different people write the same thing. Also, what scam?

The range of handwriting among the two groups certainly overlaps! I think this is because penmanship is a completely different skill from other aspects of writing (such as composition). I have had beginner student of Chinese who write very good-looking characters from day one, although of course they still struggle with things that require knowledge of characters, such as how long certain strokes should be, which strokes should touch or cross certain other strokes and so on.

Learning to read and write Chinese characters certainly takes a long time, probably longer than learning any other written language. However, we don’t have to exaggerate the difficulty. A misplaced stroke will almost never influence the comprehensibility of what you write. There are specific cases where certain characters differ only in one stroke (position, length, relationship to other strokes), but these aren’t very common, and in context, it’s practically never an issue. That doesn’t make the writing system easy to learn, but it’s not impossible!