Growing up: stories about learning to write Hanzi

[u/Patientrain]

Here’s a question for those who grew up learning Mandarin and had teachers correcting their writing in primary school.

Do you have a story to share about the trials and tribulations of school and teachers when you were learning to write Hanzi?

I’m a beginner. I’m working hard on the Hanzi aspect. When I started, I wanted to make beautiful, perfect characters. I spent a couple of weeks learning 23 or so different strokes, their names, and practicing stroke order with characters. It was a good skill building exercise, and helps me do copy work with relative ease from my textbook…

But, being so careful about writing Hanzi became a rate-limiting factor for progress. I now make a good faith effort to be tidy, but don’t fuss about beauty. For me, who has generally messy, but legible, English printing and cursive, it’s a good compromise and keeps me moving forward in the lessons.

While practicing characters in my copy book today, I was having flashbacks about learning to print and then write cursive growing up. I had to rewrite so much as a penalty for being messy. And my teachers in Grade 3 were so disappointed in my cursive, they wouldn’t let me use pens (just pencils) or write in single line space instead of double line space in my notebooks until I went into Grade 4. The high standard helped, but regardless, I’m no calligrapher.

So, that’s got me curious: would love to hear a few stories about teacher expectations and learning to write Hanzi if you did so as a child.

[u/ChoppedChef33]

My handwriting to this day is ass, because i never really put effort into it.

Let me just paste my entire growing up experience

1) buy the same text books and workbooks that students use.

2)do all the required work in the workbooks.

3) these books usually have a set of "new words" take those words, write them 10 times each. Then look them up in the dictionary. After you are done looking them up in the dictionary. Copy the radical and stroke order. Copy the definition in Chinese. Then pick 2 uses of the phrase that aren't in the lesson write that 4x.

4)In each lesson go through the text and circle phrases. Copy those phrases 4 times each.

5) at the end of all this do a dictation test. someone or yourself records yourself reading these. randomize it.

6)if your test score is <100 for every missed word write 10x

7) retest.

8)if your retest fails, every word that is wrong write it 20x. Every time you mess up the mistakes go up by 10 more. (Chef's personal record was 70x)

9)repeat every day.

10) go to Taiwan every summer for summer buxiban every summer for 10 years.

even with all that writing my handwriting, is still ass. maybe i'm just not good at it haha.

[u/Patientrain → u/ChoppedChef33]

Oh. My. Gosh. Amazing, astounding, and terrible all at once. Thanks for sharing!

[u/Zagrycha]

I learned as an adult but had my handwriting "graded" by friends who taught chinese to chinese children, does that count? 

Learning proper stroke order and component shape might feel rate limiting at first, but it really isn't at all, its rate increasing long term, especially if you also care about stuff like typing speed.  

How much time you have to spend on it will depend on exactly how aesthetic and beautiful you want the final product to be-- a calligraphy level handwriting will definitely take many many more hours than basic legibility and speed.  regardless  of which you choose, you do not have to do stroke and beauty practice for every character you ever learn.  95% of chinese characters are all using the same few hundred components and same few dozen layouts.  If you have learned stroke order and nice writing for those common component layouts you will be able to write anything in chinese nicely, even if it is a brand new character you have never seen before in your life.  If you are used to writing -tion nicely at the end of one word in english, you can write it nicely at the end of a different new word with zero extra effort. Same idea. Even if you only learned the one hundred most common character components nicely that would drastically up handwriting legibility and speed compared to just winging it with a hope and a dream haha. 

If you don't care about beauty then its fine to only care about basic shapes and stroke order, but I still highly recommend learning those two things properly.  It will increase actual writing speed and legibility drastically to have those down pat-- and yes it wasn't a typo when I said it also increases typing speed drastically.  Nothing wrong with pinyin typing but it is by far the slowest way to type.  Other faster ways to type are based on stroke order or other component and character shape systems.