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@skyblond do you know if there is some sort of asian language short hand? If not chinese any of the languages that use kanji like charachers (single characters to represent words). Im curious about forms of shorthand that migbt be applied to such scripts.
In handwriting, as myself never learnt how to do shorthand, I do have my way to write, mainly keep the pen stay on paper (aka reduce strokes). But sometimes I can't read what I write, so that's the downside.
The way you describe it, it sounds like a cursive form of kanji. Which is cool in its own right.
Im a calligrapher as a hobby and while my girlfriends language doesnt have kanji it is asian. So ive been enjoying learning more about the languages from the region.
So in school youd have to learn the form on the left which is more "correct" but also less practical i guess?
In school you use pencils and pens? The older style of using brushes isnt very common for everyday writing i take it? With a brush i guess its more like calligraphy.
Actually we use pen and pencil daily. Now we only use brushes when doing calligraphy or we need write something big.
The left side is how you should write and print. And you should write like that if you want others to easily read what you write. And in school it's required to be written in the correct order of storkes, which I think some are reasonable, some are not.
This passage is write for japanese but most of the idea works for Chinese too.
https://www.tofugu.com/japanese/kanji-stroke-order/
And now we're using simplified Chinese, which means much less strokes. In Taiwan and HongKong they still use traditional Chinese, which looks nicer, but with a lof ot strokes.
Some traditional Chinese looks like (copied from wikipedia):
漢字簡化運動可追溯至新文化運動中關於文字及語文教言和國家發展的討論。
The same text but in simplified Chinese:
汉字简化运动可追溯至新文化运动中关于文字及语文教言和国家发展的讨论。
Why woukd the order of strokes matter? Doesnt it look the same regardless of what order you execute the strokes in? Thanks this is all very interesting to me.
I don't know, I didn't fully get the idea of stroke order. But from top to bottom and left to right does help shape your character.
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It's a hard question since I never thought about it. Some anwser suggest it's part of the standard. Eventually you will write the same character no matter how you write it, but to resolve any ambiguity, there has to be a standard way to write. And some suggest the correct stroke order can help you learn cursive.
Correct me if im wrong but chinese culture has a very strong aspect of conformity to it. So i suppose that is reflected even in how you are taught to write.
Maybe? I actually don't know. But I found some (most?) order are actually matches very well on how I developed my own writing style. If the orders are right, they can be combined to 1 stroke and won't looks mess. But some are not that intuitive (actually I'll call them counterintuitive).
Also, a friend of mine just send this video to me: https://www.bilibili.com/video/BV1Mb4y1P75q
It's a Chinese lecture talking about Chinese shorthand, hosted on Chinese website, so good luck :)
What i find interesting is in english there are hubdreds of different scripts to represent the same words. There is no standard form of writing. But in chinese seems much more standardized, all the way down to the stroke order.
If you rewind back to 200 years ago, in Qing Dynasty, the government actually enforced a style of essay called eight-legged essay. It defined the structure of a essay and is very limited. It's a standardized essay at that time. Writing anything other than that will be considered as non-mainstream and will be rejected by officals.
This what i mean by conformity as a cultural component. It seems to me as an outsider to be very central to chinese culture to put pressure on people to conform.
You're right on that part. And now it's still the practise. How to make society stable? Raise salary? Make social security takes care of everyone? No. Just make house price super expensive and offers a 30 years loan. If it takes 3 generations' effort to buy a house in a family, then people won't have time/energy to care other problems.
30 year loans are the norm in the usa too. Though id imagine the prices are much cheaper just due to population density.
As I found here: https://www.numbeo.com/property-investment/rankings_by_country.jsp
The house price to income ratio in China is almost 30, while in US is less than 5. So...
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Do hanzi/kanji have an alphabetical ordering? If not how would you look them up in a list in a sane way?
When talking about names, we tend to use the number of strokes. For example if your surname is 王 (Wang), it's 4 strokes, and will be placed before someone with the surname 张 (Zhang), which is 7 strokes.
Another order is for dictionaries. Sorted by PinYin, so it's from A to Z. Also in the back of the dictionary there is an index based on character parts. For example, 杉 (Shan1, means fir, a type of tree) and 枝 (Zhi1, means branch of the tree) will be under the 木 (Mu4, means wood) part. You can find the character by part, then it will tell you which page this character is on.
I have to pass on the video.
Years ago, I actually found a driver from a vendor there. I had no idea what I was trying to read, but I had an idea of how the webpages were likely organized, and via strategic mouse-over, I found it.
It was a sound-card driver. I still have the sound-card, and it likely still works.
And yes, if you're talking conformity, in China you are forced to write in right hand if you're a left-handed. Maybe now it's better? When I was young there is a student is left-handed. But for my parent's generation, everyone is forced to write in right hand. It's not law or something, just because writing in left hand will make you different and your parent don't want that.
@skyblond@qoto.org @freemo@qoto.org @SpaceLifeForm@infosec.exchange
I can say that in the Japanese language the stroke order also matters. I saw a video of a western deaf guy visiting a Japanese deaf school and the guy tried to copy over some Japanese characters. The end results looks roughly the same, but the pupils (around 8-10 years old) were saying he did it all wrong! Oh, what'd he do wrong? You have to draw the characters in a certain order! From up to down, left to right!
Plus when I was half-assedly learning some Hiragana, they also mentioned sometihng about stroke order, heh. I guess the reason given was that it'd minimize the mistakes of forgetting some small symbol of a character if you learned the right order. I guess in a language where there are notably more than 26 symbols (our Latin alphabet), you're bound to forget a little nudge or line here and there easier, so they probably have to resort to systems like this?
Knowing very little about all this, and maybe @skyblond has some better insight. But I have a theory. I think its a hold-over mostly from the past when they used brush strokes. A brush stroke will very clearly look different depending on the direction you do it. Also it will pull paint along sometimes if it crosses its own stroke.
So I suspect the direction and order of strokes comes from the fact that it was very critical with a crush, and now with pencils it matters much less if at all but its just ingrained
int he language at this point.
@freemo@qoto.org @skyblond@qoto.org @SpaceLifeForm@infosec.exchange That's actually a very valid viewpoint, I hadn't considered this. I can see this making a lot of sense. And nowadays the reasoning could have shifted to 'so you won't forget a line here and there'.
The only modern day reason i could think of for a stroke order is "well if you do it in this order each stroke ends close to where the next one begins so you can write the character a bit faster"
@freemo@qoto.org @skyblond@qoto.org @SpaceLifeForm@infosec.exchange
Well, you can compare it to the latin alphabet. You have to draw the 'a' in a certain order too at schools. Later in your life you do whatever you want, but at the start you have to draw those letters a certain way.
I even had a map full of lines where I had to draw those letters so nicely in cursive in a certain way (I don't think they do this anymore? The writing is terrible nowadays lol), but I haven't written in cursive in ages anymore, but my dad still does. I write more clearer than cursive, but back then in school, yeah, you gotta do it a certain way.
(Cursive was also invented to write faster, so it's also in line with your thinking there)
Ya know, I dont know if i was ever taught a stroke order on the latin alphabet in school... maybe. I know in calligraphy its fairly common to place a stroke order when learning though. it has to do with the fact that the strokes are relative to eachother so it does make it easier to get the right subtle lines since each stroke depends on the relative position of the other.
Why woukd the order of strokes matter? Doesnt it look the same regardless of what order you execute the strokes in?
I can only answer as far as Japanese is concerned, but I expect Chinese has a similar reason for stroke order. In Japanese, it is considered to be a fundamental part of writing and uniquely defines each character. The main reason for the order though is fluidity. When written correctly, each stroke leaves you (mostly) where you need to be for the next; it aids in writing for both speed and legibility. A hand-written character done in the wrong order is more than not, easily identifiable as "incorrect". This difference is much easier to see when written with a brush or flat marker, but pen, pencil, chalk, rocks, burnt sticks ...they all leave a heavy and light side for each stroke made. The order in which strokes are made becomes even more important when writing similarly to the (not cursive) example @skyblond put above. Writing anything in this style would be impossible to read if strokes were not made in the correct order.
Thanks so much. That lines up roughly wish some of my speculation. Much appreciate the culture sharing :)
@eshep @skyblond @freemo @SpaceLifeForm I think latin letters are similar; imagine writing letters like "r" from top right to bottom left: it would be slower, because your pencil would move more. Also, it would look a bit different, so your hurriedly-scribbled r would look different from everyone else's, and it would be harder to read. This is why kids learning to write in the latin alphabet get training on stroke ordering as well. I mean, sure: you *could* get it looking fine, just like one could write a perfect-looking "法書" with the wrong order, but it would still have those disadvantages.
@freemo
Just a simple demo to show how I normally write. The standard one is shown on the left side, they are 7, 5 and 8 strokes. And the left side is how I write those, the first one is 2 strokes because there is a separate dot there. The rest are 1 stroke.
A fun fact: In school teacher will not allow you to write like this.I was being criticized a lot when I was in school.
And because school don't allow and of course won't teach you how to write like this, almost everyone will develop their own way to write. So when talking about handwriting, unless it's intentionally write for others, it's hard to read other people's handwriting.
And I think I won't say it's cursive. The real cursive is much beautiful than this :)
@SpaceLifeForm