@Maria I've seen the handwriting of Chinese doctors as well, and the vast majority is also illegible, at least to those outside of healthcare. Occasionally, if you know exactly what they're trying to say, you can see how their scribbles correspond to words, but even then it can take quite a bit of squinting.
I had no idea Japanese even HAD a cursive script. I guess I shouldn't be surprised, but with how complicated the characters already are (to me, anyways) I never thought cursive would be compatible.
One could say Chinese has a cursive script, or Japanese kanji has a cursive script. When you say Japanese has a cursive script, it sounds weird because Japanese kanas are either cursive on their own (hiragana) or do not have a cursive (katakana).
If you search "onnade" and "hiragana" [女手] you'll see samples of what looks like beautiful scribbles are actually legible writings written in the traditional format (vertically, right-to-left). It facilitated recordkeeping when information or transactions had to be recorded rapidly. Hiragana was developed by court ladies, that's why it was previously called "onnade" which lit means "woman's hand" before taking on the current name "hiragana".
Been studying Japanese intermittently for nearly 7 years now, and I literally just learned that this cursive script is a thing. I can see why it's not more widespread lol.
My great-aunt was born during the Meiji Period (明治時代) in 1910. After surviving WW1 and WW2, she eventually came to America in the 70s and became a United States citizen in the 90s. Throughout her life until her passing in 2006, she had beautiful Japanese cursive writing. I have a lot of her letters and am in the process of archiving them digitally.
@Gary Allen A muséum? Bahahahahahhahahahaha this is the funniest shit I’ve ever seen 😂😂😂🤣🤣🤣🤣 This is not Japanese cursive, it’s Chinese, kanji literally means Chinese characters. Same with Hanza (Korean) and Hanzi (Chinese) Lots and lots of Chinese ppl can write like this, my parents have been writing like this for their entire life, hell I can somewhat even write like this.
Wow! I have been studying Japanese for 12 years and lived in Japan for 7 years, so many people would considered me super advance if not fluent. But I would never even imagine trying to read or write kanji in cursive. Yet this shows the richness and beautiful of both kanji and calligraphy. Wow!
For real I've literally never seen that! Been here 6 years, studied at school here for a full 2 years, senseis never even mentioned the existence of this "cursive" so I'm assuming nobody uses it. I've seen many people's handwritting, even old folks, and even old as fuck parchments etc, even on those the caligraphy is less hard to read than this 😂
My great grandfather wrote a letter a long time ago and it's sitting there somewhere, the first time I read it it made no sense to me as there were no recognizable characters Now after seeing this it all makes sense Thanks a lot for this!
I have all the letters of my great grand father that he wrote home from war in a big box. Now, I'm German and we use latin letters and latin cursive so you'd think that it would be easy to just read them? But no chance back then they used a different style of cursive ( called sütterlin) and without learning that from scratch i have no chance to read those old letters. Not even my grandma can lol. So yeah you're not alone in not being able to read old letters even tho they are in the same language.
@@MCoTEDDY bro ngl you should really try to learn the writing if you haven't already because I think it would just be really cool to know what your great grandfather was writing about while in war. That's just me tho and nobody is forcing you
Fun fact: Cursive Script was invented earlier than regular script for hundreds of years. 艸書(Cursive) appeared around The Warring States period(475-221 b.c.) and was popular in Han and Jin (202b.c.-618), 楷/真書(Regular) appeared in Eastern Han Dynasty (25-220), popular after Tang dynasty (618-2022) --------- Thanks for the likes, here are some additions: In order to facilitate communication, it is necessary for the cultural circle of Chinese characters to achieve a unified standard. My suggestion is to re-divide the characters into two systems, regular script for printing and cursive script for handwriting, rather than just using distorted simplified regular script (a half-finished product of failed Latinization) or write complex traditional regular script stroke by stroke. In fact, quite a few simplified characters are derived from cursive script, which has previously been written in ligatures as an informal form rather than as standard regular script. In the 1930s, Mr. Yu Youren planned to promote his standard cursive script. Unfortunately, due to the long-term war and the division of the country, it was not realized. Cursive script is a convenient, practical and beautiful shorthand writing style, which needs to be revived!
Watching you write is always so peaceful. I am shocked at how the kanji look in cursive, I noticed most of these have some shared radicals in their normal version, but it looks extremely different as cursive.
@Jul W right nobody cares about a comment about Kanji in cursive... under a video about Kanji in cursive.... Its 2022 being rude for no reason is lame af
kanji is highly similar to simplified chinese, so my knowledge of the latter helped me understand how hard it can be to write the former then the cursive came in and i died
Japnese Kanji is much closer to traditional Chinese characters, just slightly simplified. Traditionally, Japanese Kanji = Traditional Chinese. But, the Japanese government announced Shinjitai (新字体) in 1946, trying to simplify the Kanji character. That's why they have the difference.
literally it will be "夫失先矢，克充，去", but incomprehensible at all :). If this is said in normal way, should follow "有夫遺其矢……" Yu Youren mentioned in Standard Cursive Script that "if two near similar characters cannot be identified via context meaning, it'll be better to write in ortho-form (章草) of them". An Orthocursive example is 急就章.
I've been writing only in cursive since 1st grade, when I was in Highschool I asked my Japanese teacher if it was possible to write Japanese in cursive, with a big smile on her face she only said that it looks really weird and is very difficult to understand. 😆
When I was a university student, I asked my Japanese teacher (Japanese polyglot and linguist who can speak ~7-8 languages) about how I could learn writing in semi cursive like most Japanese people do in their daily life. He told me that he couldn't really teach me as you just learn it on your own as you learn how to write (and obviously, you must know the strokes order if you want to write in an understandable semihcursive or cursive handwriting). XD lol
This is how my dad writes… He’s always in a rush, so he writes really fast. Even though my family is Chinese and not Japanese, many characters are very similar in both languages like the ones shown in the video.
That's because written Japanese takes characters from Chinese. Sometimes they even have the same meanings (though they are usually pronounced differently)
@@vancemccarthy2554 no they did have their own (and their own characters have a distinct flair which is pretty neat), but adopting Chinese characters wasn’t much of a choice. It also happened very long ago so the language has had plenty of time to fully normalize. But many centuries of colonialism between the two nations have left deep scars, including vast erasure of original Japanese characters. I’m pretty sure Okinawa even had distinct writing before Japan invaded them, but I’m remembering that kinda fuzzy
I can't imagine the intensity a kid would have in examwhere he is like oh no it's the last 5 minutes yet he has to write those letters so elegantly and finely delivered. My writing goes on pair with doctors pesrcibed letters in those moments
They will use semi-cursive script instead of cursive script. Despite its English names, they were entirely different altogether. In fact cursive script is not the cursive version of the regular chinese letter or kanji, it's the cursive version of clerical script of ancient Chinese government.
This guy is a master. It's not a representative example of how people write on a daily basis. Most kids and adults don't write kanji so elegantly. Just like English, you see difficult to read handwriting in Japan also.
@@markj.a351 heck, I even heard with the advent of keyboard majority of younger Japanese can't even write most of common Kanji anymore, though they can recognize it.
@@mbrusyda9437 Haha, It's like kids nowadays can't spell their english right. Even Chinese can't write chinese correctly. Modern people has horrible handwriting
Hey, takeshi, what is that script doing? Its starting to believe, my dear naomi, it ascended to the land not many have the intellect to truly understand what the FUCK DOES THIS SHIT MEAN, NAOMI, WHAT THE FUCK IS THIS SUPPOSED TO MEAN!?
I was fearful when I learned Japanese has 3 alphabets. I was intimidated when I learned that one of them work similar to the Mandarin script. Now my life flashed before my eyes as I believed death had almost hit me from learning about Kanji cursive.
mandarin is not a script, merely a spoken language 漢字 hanzi is, the japanese pronunciation of hanzi is kanji which literally mean 「chinese characters」 the characters are shared by many languages in and out of china, korea used hanja and vietnam used chu nom
@@yurashida Well it doesn't matter at this point for me. In it's written form, it looks and works similar to each other, and now that you tell me the meaning of kanji, it proves that they work similarly.
@@robertsummers3386 you seem too misunderstand, mandarin is a language too which chinese characters are not exclusive too, it would be like saying 「germany uses english alphabet」 there are many languages in china (cantonese, hakka, wu, minnan, fuzhounese, mandarin) and they all use chinese character
Seems to me the words are much more distinct in cursive. Also a lightbulb just went off in my head, there were Japanese exchange students in my class years ago. Their English handwriting was unbelievable neat and precise and it was all print, not joint letters. Seeing how they write in their own language explains a lot.
These characters are also used in Mandarin, with the same meanings, which a lot of people in the world other than speaks (it’s just a bit regionally concentrated)
Although anyone trying to learn Japanese is going to have an easier time with the regular script. I can recognise a few kanji. That cursive on the other hand, although it looks really nice, yeah that would be hell to try to learn.
Chinese characters are shared culture across eastern Asia So non-Japanese like Korean, Vietnamese, Taiwanese, and of course Chinese can read it to varying degrees
There are five traditional forms of Chinese calligraphy: Seal Character, Official Script, Formal Script, Running Script, Formal Script, Running Script, and Cursive Hand. These are considered classical arts and representative of Chinese art styles. The most popular calligraphy style is the Seal Character style developed by the Han people. It first appeared during the Zhou Dynasty (1045 - 221 BC) and is still popular among calligraphy artists today.
@@querimoniouslimner8081 Most would be able to read 3 of the 5 traditional scripts actually. Understanding would be dependent on level of education, the other 2 scripts would actually require learning.
You should only write cursive with a brush pen! The fact that most Japanese can’t tell the difference between those cursive kanji makes me feel a little better.
You surely can write 行草 with a pencil or ball pen. Virtually all hand written characters falls under this style For all languages, cursive writing emerge naturally with sped up hand writing No body will actually write in the "regular script" shown on the video, did you notice how impractically slow you need to write it that way?
Oh you have got to be kidding me. I love how Japanese is like if you somehow learn every kanji that exists, you can do it again but this time they look even more similar 😂
No wonder. I don't always get how the cursive shapes are related to the classical shapes either. (The same problem is with the cursive Hebrew script, by the way. It looks utterly unrelated to the beautiful, aesthetical script sofers copy the Tora in)
True, but the main difference is that there are only 22 characters in Hebrew as opposed to the 3,000 or so Kanji characters. In fact even if you learned the two Hebrew scripts, you would still be learning less characters / combinations than if you were to learn Hiragana. Also I personally really dislike non-cursive Hebrew haha
@@MizManFryingP You're right, the characters themselves are only 44 ones (46 if you consider shin and sin different letters). However, even in Hebrew, the written words are half like kanji for the beginner. Because just some of the vowels are actually written and you have to learn the pronunciation by heart until you have grasped how the vocalization works.
In Japanese kanji the order of strokes in important. If you link at the cursive characters, they're basically the "flow" of the pen through the print character in the order & direction of the strokes. Add to that a couple of stops to emphasize a line or a change in direction and you've got the cursive
Considering how decorative and flowing Kanji is, and how difficult learning to read and write it can be, and the fact they already have a formal and informal script, I'm surprised the Japanese were masochistic enough to invent a CURSIVE version as well, and totally unsurprised that most Japanes have never in their lives bothered to learn it.
If it was similar to how English went about it I’d imagine the cursive script was older if anything. Flowing lines are much easier to write with when using quills and older styles of writing implements.
@@axiomshift4666 Well, yeah, but the point of cursive is continuous ink flow to ensure smooth writing from a quill or fountain or other nib type pen. The Japanese didn't traditionally write with quills or other nib style pens, they used brushes. So I am pretty sure Japanese cursive probably came about LATER rather than sooner, as nib pens became common in the country. Which means probably around the Meiji Restoration, when Meiji ended the nation's self-sequestering.
@@GuukanKitsune it’s easier to write with fewer brush strokes as well. Similar principle. From what I read it appeared in ancient china because it helped to write things faster.
@@GuukanKitsune Even today cursive is much more efficient as a form of writing if you know how to do it. Just most people don’t even bother learning how to do it since most communication is digital now.
Japanese is an extremely interesting language, but the more I watch these calligraphy videos the more I accept that I'll never have the will to learn something SO complicated
I blame cultural conservatives who refuse to let go of clunky old traditions. Make written Japanese all kana, throw in some spaces, and you're good to go. The traditionalists will whine about homophones, but for some reason there's no mass confusion with the spoken language. Schools could save literal years of time to spend on education that's actually useful, instead of teaching what's effectively half of an extra language just so people can write in their first language.
@@firstnamelastname8439 People do not mistake homophones due to the fact that various words that contain the same letters have different pitch accents, they should also develop a system to write these.
Seems simple if anything. Overcome and sufficiency are different by making a square in the middle versus a triangle lol. Too words that are not spelled the same it all. The cursive version is even easier.
@@firstnamelastname8439 even without all the homophones, it's still a terrible, terrible idea. for example, when you're driving to a certain place, you must be able to identify traffic signs quickly, because you're often going really fast, and stopping all the damn time to read them would be very counter-intuitive. and reading a massive string of kana can be difficult to do quickly. this is an instance where kanji can be pretty useful, because you can fit all the needed information in much less characters, thus making it easier to read. there is a reason why previous attempts to remove kanji have kinda failed.
This is by all means interesting. I also found amusing how the differences between some of them are really small in cursive, just like in regular writing, such as 太 and 犬, or 休 and 体.
Japanese calligraphy is just so majestic to look at. You'll see this a lot in historical Japanese anime, like in demon slayer, and video games like Fate/samurai remnant, even in Japanese light novels
The cursive kanji here all have their similarities, but the only ones I can see getting /easily/ mixed up are "tip" and "overcome". The rest have clear enough distinctions to tell apart, though they admittedly look drastically different from their print-kanji counterparts.
I honestly feel as an American I would have more luck trying to master the cursive than the regular. Something about it just seems more natural. It sort of has a familiarity representing English cursive. It also kind of reminds me of Arabic, which I don't understand at all. Arabic only feels sort of familiar because I can read Hebrew which I get isn't really related, but I don't think in principle it's that incredibly far off. I'm trying to say is her subscript seems a little more digestible
I can barely tell the difference between some of the print characters. It boggles my mind that cursive kanji even exists. Why would the Japanese do something so cruel to themselves?
Fun fact: As an American, I lived in Japan. It only took me a few months to learn how to speak it. I learned that most of the Japanese citizens I met could not read japanese that well at all.
cuz they didn't really have their own writing system so they had to borrow another writing system that had substance and 'structure'. When I see their writing all I see are random squiggles. There are at laest 3 writing systems. Not exactly sure how that's supposed to make everything convenient....
@@drakke125Channel The reason they have multiple writing systems is because kanji can be read multiple ways. By combining kanji with hiragana you can illustrate how it's supposed to be pronounced. Katakana is for loanwords. Without one of these systems everything becomes much less clear to read. No hiragana and you have no idea how to read any of the kanji. No kanji and you run into the issue of Japan having a lot of homophones with no easy way to distinguish them. No kana and loanwords actually become much more difficult to identify what it's supposed to mean.
@@faraaq lol. I fancy myself one day learning japanese, but you gotta see the facts. They borrowed their writting from the chinese. Both them and the chinese had to learn english in order to use computers. Yes, they can write in japanese on computers, but it's super weird and such a hassle. And most of their population don't know how to write it correctly or they know only a finite amount of kanji because there are freaking thousands to learn! I mean... That is what deserves an Yikes lol
I was trying to learn Chinese characters for last 6-7 months and I just discovered the cursive form few days ago and my reaction was literally like 😑 I almost gave up 😂
Learning Japanese as a second language I admit cursive completely confounds me. Sometimes people know something is in Japanese (but it's cursive) and they ask me what it says and I'm just like "No idea."
I think we are all forgetting that these cursive kanji would have context behind them. Consider the following: He is right. VS He is right-handed. We know which definition of "right" is being used because of the context in the sentence. So although these Kanji would have very similar looks, in context they could be discernable.
父の恩師から来た手紙を誰も読めなくて、草書ってそんなモノだと思ってたけど、今、書道家なら読めるって事を知った。 No one read the letter that came from my father's teacher. So I thought I couldn't read Japanese cursive. But, I found that a calligrapher could read.
No, That‘s showing you didn’t know about Cursive. It is a very standardized system. Characters will have small differences, even they looks the similar. That is why there’s many school teaching about cursive. Cursive show more professional.
Back in the day I used to study japanese at a university. We were only like a couple of months in and already struggled to keep up with remembering like 200 kanji when our dumbass teacher decides to write in this stupid cursive/messy handwriting. Then he would make us take turns reading the blackboard and was fricking shocked when we couldn't read the most basic kanji. He was like "you don't know this?? It's in chapter one!!!!" And we were just sitting there like "wtf???" He was a very strict and scary teacher too, so no one dared critizising his handwriting. But really, should a *japanese* *teacher* really be told to not write like a freaking doctor while teaching?😅
I found that we Chinese write “去” in a similar way with the cursive version, but others… completely different lol. Chinese handwriting would preserve horizontal, vertical and square features, but get them interconnected. 二 looks like Z, 十 assembles mirrored 4, 口like 12, such like that.
I feel you man, I feel you. I can assure you, you will not find this at all in common Japan. Only us masochists in Calligraphy classes and students who major in Ancient Japanese history understand them and know how to write them, so do yourself a favour and forget cursive. Keep on learning!
Kanji itself is over 3000 years old and from what I can tell is still taught mostly out of tradition. Considering three general forms of writing in Japanese exist, it seems to me that a simpler alphabet would serve a more universal purpose. Don't mistake the beauty of Kanji and its alternative forms to write it I'm saying there must be a realistic solution that can be adopted that would serve in a more universal sense. Though what that would be, I'm not sure.
As a Taiwanese who is a native speaker of Mandarin, this video is interesting and entertaining!! Because I can tell the difference easily, and never understand how difficult to do THIS for who's not native.
