JAPANESE WRITING TUTOR.

The Japanese Writing Tutor “is meant to help students of Japanese practice their writing skills. By following along with the motion of several animated GIF files, you can hone your writing skills, making your katakana, hiragana, and kanji more legible.”

When I first began learning Japanese, I found that among all of the other difficulties, writing posed special challenges. Not the least of these challenges was the fact that when writing Japanese characters, you must follow a specific order and direction of the strokes in order to be understood by a native reader of Japanese. Several times when trying to communicate through writing, I was met with blank looks of incomprehension, because what to me looked like the character for “water” looked to the average Japanese person like a scribbled mess.
Any book that deals with Japanese writing (two I have found immensely useful are Reading Japanese by Jorden and Chaplin, and Essential Kanji by P. G. O’Neill) will indicate stroke order, but I feel that a static representation doesn’t really create much of an impression. Anything that I learned was quickly forgotten, and I was back to drawing kuchi as a circle.

With that in mind, I’ve constructed a series of animated GIF files that will lead you through how to write each character. Each image is like a brief cartoon on an endless loop. You will first see a large representation of the character on question, then watch as a brush draws the character on paper. Your job is to mimic the movement of the brush with pen or pencil on paper. Practice each character until you feel comfortable and natural drawing it. Just choose a subset below (katakana, hiragana, or kanji) and begin. Please note if your web browser does not support animated GIFs, this page won’t be of much use to you.

Via wood s lot.

Comments

  1. joe tomei says

    Anyone who is using Japanese on the Mac should be aware of Sergei Kurkin’s shareware JEDict, a front end for EDICT dictionary files. While it doesn’t animate the strokes, it uses arrows, but provides a wealth of information, including example sentences and specialized dictionaries as well as breaking the kanji into component parts or letting you search on the basis of 1 or 2 components that you recognize. Info is here
    You can use it as a basic app for free, and install multiple dictionaries if you pay the $25 shareware fee

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