r/ChineseLanguage • u/[deleted] • Aug 20 '21
Humor knowing the stroke order doesn't help
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Aug 20 '21
My problem is I'm really bad at relative sizes. so the left/right part of a character will always be too tall or short or weirdly shaped in relation to the other parts.
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u/Milky_Mint_Way Aug 20 '21
Half-Chinese here, and this word was a pain when I first learned this ~20 years ago in class. I remember back then the whole class except for that one guy who had 家 in his name was struggling to write this. The whole class ended up asking that guy to write 家 in our worksheet because none of us could get it.
But hey, if you learn how to write 家, you could probably write any other word at this point.
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u/Mega_Mandarin Aug 20 '21
Here is what 家 looks like when written by a professional calligrapher. It's ten strokes in the 楷书 form and six strokes in the 行书 form.
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u/Dareptor Aug 20 '21
I think the problem is the approach. I struggled a lot when I was learning the characters in a manner of usefulness. I recently switched to learning them by radicals with remember the Kanji instead (I’m majoring in Japanese, Chinese is just a hobby, there’ also remember the simplified Hanzi though). The difference in speed of acquisition is remarkable, but this brute forcing method only makes sense if you stick with it, I know the Character for gallbladder now for example but not for Car. Some people swear by this approach though, it made learning 20 characters a day for me actually feasible, especially in combination with Anki.
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u/4evaronin Aug 20 '21
The stroke order comes after learning (and practicing) the basic strokes first. You don't just look at a character and attempt to copy the entire thing straightaway.
There aren't that many strokes to learn. The heng (horizontal stroke), shu (vertical), pie (back slash, for lack of a better term), na (forward slash), gou (hook), dian (dot) etc. Look at a reference and practice these first. Once you got the basic strokes right, you can easily write any character and tell with a glance which strokes you need for any character.
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u/Keanu__weaves Aug 20 '21
That used to be my least favorite character to write, but now i kinda enjoy it.
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u/LegoPirateShip Aug 20 '21
Luckily for you it's 2021 now, and you only have to hand write anything else besides your name and address, is if you are a student or teacher. 😁
I can't remember the last time I wrote anything in any of the languages I know.
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u/JBfan88 Aug 21 '21
Yet for some reason handwriting was made mandatory in the new HSK 3.0 (previously you could take the computer-only version).
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u/Ian_Andrew Aug 20 '21
What does it mean? It looks like kanji for "dream" I have it tattooed on my hand... It's so similar
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u/tanukibento Aug 20 '21
家means house - I hope your tattoo isn't this character!
Dream is
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u/sreache Aug 20 '21
Native Chinese here. My handwriting was worse than this until I spent some time in calligraphy when I was 9 years old, and I know a ton of people that still do worse than this in their adults. I'd say learning the structure of characters feels a bit like learning how to draw, even to native Chinese.
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u/fisherity Aug 21 '21
Even as a native speaker Chinese writings are difficult for us too. I hate writing words with 心 at the bottom, especially when i try to write fast, it just ends up looking like a scribble line
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u/maxionjion Aug 21 '21
Anyone tried to write 舅 by hand? Every Chinese new year i spend 10 min practicing it for sending new years card, but never get it look right. And i am f#@*ing native....
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u/GrillOrBeGrilled Aug 20 '21 edited Aug 20 '21
For me, it's any character with 女。Meanwhile, my 家 looks like ふ with a hat, and I'm a little too proud of that.