ilubmoney

哈！ 你觉得我告诉你我的秘密吗？你开玩笑！我不告诉你！哈哈哈！

可能我要告诉。你很想知道吗？

我没有秘密！每个人不能看汉字不知道! 他们听不懂！

可能你诈骗用词典！骗子！别犯愁。 我不告诉别的人你的秘密。 ;)

This "Chinese" tag I have is severely underused!

There were a few times this past week where I just sat down and practiced writing for the hell of it. And I really enjoyed it. It was something about working with characters. Reading them felt like codebreaking (fun!), and writing them was just beautiful and relaxing. I haven't done much in the way of learning new vocabulary, but instead have refocused my efforts in just learning characters for the words I do know.

Earlier last week, I just tried to write down as many characters I could think of off the top of my head, the ones I really knew how to write instead of just recognize. That came out to less than 200 characters, which is pretty sad. My character recognition is higher than that, but it's hard to gauge how many more characters I do know. I'd be interested to know how many words I know verbally, though I'm not sure how I could calculate that.

Part of the new emphasis in writing characters has to do with seeing students' messages in my farewell book. I was amazed at how different and interesting everyone's handwriting was--not that Chinese handwriting would be any less varied than English handwriting. But it just looked so different from regular hanzi type, and it was really beautiful in a modern way! I tried to emulate different styles using familiar characters (wo, ni, ta/ta, etc.) and ended up developing my own sort of handwriting. But the handwritten flow came more easily for characters I wrote often, like "hen," "wo," "ni."

Here's an example of the difference.


The top character is how someone who's just learning Chinese might write hen ("very"). Some people might say that the top character looks kind of babyish the way kids write their ABCs when they're first learning. Every stroke and dot is carefully, cleanly, precisely drawn; there are no extra marks. The bottom character is the same one, and although the basic shape is preserved, you can see the strokes flow better; in other words, like an adult writing their letters, the pen movement has become more intuitive.

Here's another example that might better illustrate the difference.


This is the character for mei, "pretty." Again, the strokes flow better in the second character. A lot of these extra ink bits you see at the end come from using an ink pen instead of a ballpoint. It certainly explains why ink pens are far more common in China--it's just easier and more lovely to write with! If you've got to convey your meaning in a tiny square of an area, you're gonna want to make it as easy as possible.

Anyway, everyone writes their characters with different shorthands for different radicals. I'm trying to develop my own way to do it, and it's been artistically fun and highly motivating for learning more Chinese. (Will be cross-posted to xiangji soon.)

A brief bit of simple Chinese, all Chinese. Translation in the cut below.

The general update. (In English, mostly.)

( Translation for the first bit )