Study Chinese Online From China

Writing Chinese online, should you do it?

August 17, 2006 on 6:25 am | In Misconceptions, Studying |

There are a few schools of thought on the topic of writing in Chinese. Let’s first start off by separating out print handwriting, cursive handwriting, typing and composition. Why is it so important to separate out these aspects of writing? It’s because for Chinese each of these skills can require quite a bit of effort to learn on it’s own, so lumping them all together under a big topic like writing can only lead to frustration and the common phrase “It’s impossible to learn how to write in Chinese.”

In fact, if one clearly defines one’s goals for the Chinese language it is quite easy to incrementally learn each of these skills and maybe one day even be able to fit them all into a phrase like “Learning to write in Chinese wasn’t too hard.”

• print handwriting, this is what is usually taught in an academic program or by Chinese teachers. Take a pen or pencil and trace/copy that character onto a piece of paper. Do this 10 x. Do this until your hands hurt. There is value to this activity when you first start learning, but the method clearly degrades in usefullness when looked to as a memorization aide. The characters you write here are ’standard’ print-type of style. It is slow to write and few adults continue to write Chinese in this way. Why? Because it’s too slow.
• cursive handwriting, this is what most native Chinese eventually gravitate to in their handwriting. It’s that flowing scribble that doesn’t look anything like the print that teachers made you write ad infinitum. It’s the only way to really write quickly enough so that the writing flows as quickly as your thoughts. You’ll have to find a patient friend or calligraphy teacher to teach you the basic principles of the flowing strokes so that you can intuitively convert and convert properly a square-print style character into a cursive script.
• typing, this is the act of using some tool to generate characters. Usually it involves pinyin and a pick-list of characters. SMS, IM, mobile phones, typing online all use this method.
• composition, this refers to the act of taking Chinese text and reviewing it for proper grammar, style, typos, etc.