Live data from Hacker News

Japan's Paper Culture

jetpens.com

1–10 of 164 posts

Re: Japan's Paper Culture

#3
post #2

I often want to reteach myself handwriting to be able to write like this. Has anyone here had success in doing this? How did you go about it?

It just takes dedicated and deliberate practise. There's no secret method I'm afraid. Oh, except for "go slow".

Re: Japan's Paper Culture

#4
post #2

I often want to reteach myself handwriting to be able to write like this. Has anyone here had success in doing this? How did you go about it?

I massively improved my handwriting with near daily practice for a few months. Just the alphabet and various words (stuck with print, not script, so limited need to practice hard letter sequences). Pretty much just filled legal pads with letters and some words until my handwriting was to a level I was happy with.

Re: Japan's Paper Culture

#5
post #2

I often want to reteach myself handwriting to be able to write like this. Has anyone here had success in doing this? How did you go about it?

I have, using Handwriting Repair by Briem. It was less work than I expected, and my handwriting looks pretty cool now. Even if you don't adopt the italic style advocated by the book, the other advice is still generally useful. I printed out the tracing page and did that a few times a day for a few days to get familiar with it. After that, it took a while, but it eventually became natural to write that way. The italic style helps with writing fast.

https://sites.google.com/view/briem/free-books/handwriting-r...

Re: Japan's Paper Culture

#6
post #2

I often want to reteach myself handwriting to be able to write like this. Has anyone here had success in doing this? How did you go about it?

Look for penmanship manuals, there are many out there online. They will be full of instructions and exercises.

Calligraphy manuals may be interesting too but that is somewhat more decorative.

Re: Japan's Paper Culture

#7
Growing up, I had a friend with a Japanese parent. She had supernaturally neat handwriting, produced with various impossibly cute and meticulous-looking Japanese pens and stationary over the years. I felt like some kind of clumsy, nasty barbarian in comparison.

Japan is, of course, just a place. The people there are ordinary humans. Fetishizing a particular culture is both cringeworthy and genuinely harmful. Their country and society have plenty of problems, just like any other. There is nothing magical about Japan or any other place.

However. If all that remains of their civilization in 10,000 years is a curiously well-preserved Japanese stationary store, perhaps buried Pompei-style and frozen in time... future historians may conclude otherwise.

Re: Japan's Paper Culture

#8
post #3
post #2

I often want to reteach myself handwriting to be able to write like this. Has anyone here had success in doing this? How did you go about it?

It just takes dedicated and deliberate practise. There's no secret method I'm afraid. Oh, except for "go slow".

One tip is that you need to train your eye as much as you train your hand.

First redo your grip, it probably sucks.

Then relearn the alphabet using that grip to the standard of your eye.

Then relearn to see the flaws in your handwriting in increasingly subtle ways and keep training to eliminate those flaws up to the standard of your eye.

Re: Japan's Paper Culture

#9
post #2

I often want to reteach myself handwriting to be able to write like this. Has anyone here had success in doing this? How did you go about it?

I took a calligraphy course when I was in uni. Interestingly enough by a Japanese woman. City I went to school in also has one of the largest Japanese communities in Europe and a even a few Japanese crafts/pens/office shops. Article definitely rings true.

If you have a university close by that's I think a decent place to start.

Post reply on HN