Comments on: Learning to read handwritten Chinese

By: Danilo

Danilo — Sat, 14 Nov 2020 21:16:01 +0000

In reply to arthur. Interesting. But what was the point of asking them to re-write the paragraph in Chinese, since you were teaching them English? Was it kind of a favor you asked them so you could improve your own Chinese? Anyway, your idea was ingenious.

By: arthur

arthur — Fri, 25 Aug 2017 11:45:30 +0000

I quickly became aware of this problem early in my study of Chinese: I could read Chinese when it was clearly typed in a clear and basic font, but had quite a difficult time reading handwritten or `fancy’ cursive Chinese script.
Fortunately, I am in China, working as an English teacher at a University.
So I would hand out a paragraph… perhaps containing a couple hundred Chinese characters… to my students at the end of class and request that they all write out the paragraph and hand in the papers to me.

Then, comparing the original, clearly typewritten text with the cursive, handwritten texts from the students, with a great variety of handwriting styles, I was fairly quickly able to drastically improve my reading ability.

By: Jan

Jan — Fri, 26 Aug 2016 19:32:07 +0000

Great post! I’ve been trying to work on my handwriting but I struggle with 字帖. As soon as I stop tracing, my characters look nothing like theirs. One book that I’ve found very helpful is 席殊3SFM实用硬笔字60小时训练 (think I saw it posted on chinese-forums a while back). It’s a mix of 字帖 and instructions on different strokes and components that it groups new characters by. I don’t actually find the handwriting in the book very visually appealing, but the explanations do help.