Handwriting within different writing systems

[necroad]

I have dyspraxia. In relation to languages, it means I sometimes have trouble with my handwriting. However, I find that writing in Japanese is much easier and my handwriting is a lot more legible

Comments

[frances_bea]

When I was in elementary school we were taught a very strict stroke order for writing English. Is that not the norm?

[frances_bea]

Here's an example:

[necroad]

Now that you mention it I remember something similar. Over the years I've completely forgotten about that... I remember having tracing paper for letters and such? I can't really remember... There were handwriting things with three lines which we had to fit them on, but there wasn't any specific stroke order if I remember correctly.

When were you at elementary school? How old are you?

[frances_bea]

I started elementary school in the early 1980s. We had worksheets in kindergarten with the stroke order shown similar to this image, and lots of space for us to practice recreating the letters. I remember being told that the stroke order was important because the letter would not look the same if it was drawn out of order.

[sollersuk]

When I learned French handwriting back in the 1950s it was very organised. We had paper with little lines and taught how many lines to go up for the tall letters and how many lines to go down; we were taught where to start the letters, and how to join them on to the next one; we started off with several examples of each letter drawn in dots for us to trace and then carried on for the rest of the line. I remember several classmates over the years there who I think now were dyspraxic, but their writing was fine. What seems to have helpted was the fact that the pen didn't come off the paper till the end of the word.

[frances_bea]

We had something very similar for cursive writing (in the Northeastern US in the 1980s). One year we even had practice sheets with angled vertical lines that we could use to practice getting just the right about of forward tilt to our letters. We were taught how to connect different types of letters, some letters switching to alternate forms if they followed letters that hadn't returned to the base line. (For instance, the first "e" in "because" used the alternate form.)

[noirplus]

I don't have dyspraxia, but I have the same problem with my handwriting using the Latin alphabet. It's just lame and often illegible. However, I've recently learned to write (cursive) Serbian Cyrillic which for some reason I write more beautifully. Ditto hiragana and katakana.

[butterpixie]

Same for me! I learned Serbian cyrillic cursive and it's helped my English handwriting. Although, I don't think I write in Japanese that well and my Chinese is just atrocious. Strange.

[kohda]

I thought all writing systems had a preferred stroke order. I know the latin alphabet does-- my brother doesn't use it and it drives me nuts when I watch him write.

In my experience it has to do with how quickly you write and how comfortable you are with the writing system. My English cursive was beautiful when I first learned how to do it, and now if I don't consciously think about writing neatly, I sometimes can't read my own notes. And Japanese is not always necessarily more legible; ever read handwritten notes from Japanese people?

[necroad]

I don't remember ever being taught a stroke order personally but it's interesting to see other people have been.

Haha, yes, indeed. I'm just trying to say my Japanese is a hell of a lot more legible than my English.

[verrucaria]

And Japanese is not always necessarily more legible; ever read handwritten notes from Japanese people?

I'm completely ignorant about Japanese, but I'd assume that if you changed things up even a little bit, the character would no longer be legible. (You could change the order of strokes, I guess, but if you shifted the locations of the lines even a bit, it'd be really hard to figure out the character that you meant to write.)

The Latin alphabet (and many other writing systems) has fewer characters, which makes it easier to decipher "bad penmanship."

[sobdasha]

I don't actually know stroke orders for Japanese, although I can make good guesses now that I've studied some Chinese. But I started trying to pick up Japanese on my own through my interest in manga. I had a chart of kana that I'd copied off a website into a notebook as if they were pictures [trying to capture the entire character without knowing how to break it up into strokes], and used it to translate kana into romanji. Hours of frustrated staring at different fonts and handwriting and finally being able to match them up to the pictures of kana taught me quite a bit about strokes and how the kana were constructed, enabling me to get better and better at identifying what was supposed to be written

[mad_troll]

I remember those writing aids too -at least in the German kindergarten & school- and now it makes more sense why my ex-classmates from that school have a ..well, a calligraphy and such a disproportionate number of those from the other, non writing-aid-employing one have a terrible handwriting (I'll include myself in this group).
When I write using the Latin alphabet, it's usually illegible for anyone but me -and sometimes even that requires a certain effort!- whereas my Hebrew writing is..leggible. (But that might come from the peculiar, not-quite-cursive aspect of it ^_^;)