Chinese Caligraphy
Last week we were introduced to Chinese Caligraphy (毛笔字). You can the results of my efforts above. Whilst my characters may be a long way off artistic excelence, we had great fun. There are so many sides to learning Chinese that I had never appreciated.
I think the artistic gene, at least the one that involves using a paintbrush, passed me by. My brother and sisters seem to be able to pick up a paintbrush and just produce magnificent work. Clearly more practice is required on my part.
Hi Bill,
Chinese script looks very artistic. I wonder how much more time it takes to write the same word in English & Chinese. Each alphabet seems to have many strokes.
Have fun
@ShriNagesh: Thanks. For me it takes forever to write a single character. However, watching someone who has grown up writing the language is a completely different story.
But, interestingly, when you see English and Chinese versions of the same text side by side, the english appears much longer. Maybe you have to write less to convey the same meaning in Chinese. Either that, or some of the meaning is lost in translation.
@Bill I don’t think its that you have to write fewer words (you may, but that’s probably negligible), or meaning gets lost in translation (which it undoubtedly does, but that’s not the point). It’s more that Chinese characters compress the whole meaning of a word into a smaller physical space: Example “Character” and 字 pretty much mean the same thing on the surface (though both have many other meanings, homonyms and generally “live” in a different linguistic ecosystem), typographically, character just takes up more space….
Also on a similar tangent, check out how much more meaning Chinese can fit into a tweet: 140 characters is around 90-100 (rough guestamate, and varies widely depending on style) words. In English your lucky if you can get 25.
我的两分钱 － my two cents.
I think you touch on something that is probably quite important when learning to write/read 汉字. I think you need to understand and appreciate each character in its entirety. For me, recognising characters is still (yes after all this time) very much a guessing game. I have a lot to learn.